New year blog maintenance

Happy new year, everyone. I’ve been doing a bit of tidying up on some of the pages of this blog. … More

Lifesaving Poems: Sean O’Brien’s ‘Before’

BeforeMake over the alleys and gardens to birdsong,the hour of not-for-an-hour. Lie still.Leave the socks you forgot on the clothesline.Leave … More

I have been writing recently about going deeper, not wider. Listening to music I already possess, reading the books already … More

Rupert Loydell is shouting at the countryside. I have got up at sparrow-fart to drive him to the Blandford … More

My friend Rupert Loydell has emailed me a list of blog posts curated by Rob Mclennan on writing at the … More

I met Fairnie somewhere round the back of Richard Nicholson (or was it Rupert Loydell?) sometime in the very early … More

Groundsmen The pile of cuttings puts on dreadful weight, swelters in the season, and leaks treacle. Beside it, the … More

I am in the pub with Rupert. We are talking about planning a thing. It’s definitely going to happen. A … More

We had been in the new city for two months. The house we had bought was even more of a … More

I’m grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you. –Raymond Carver (‘For Tess’) A kind, wise man once … More

I met Evangeline Paterson once, in the early Nineties, at a workshop in London. Rupert Loydell suggested I went as … More

Sometime in 1997 I went to hear Kevin Crossley-Holland give a reading at Exeter Central Library. I’d heard he was … More

To safe and almost universal silence I published How Far From Here is Home? (Stride) a few days before Christmas in … More

I first met Lawrence Sail at a private view at a gallery just outside Exeter. My family and I … More

What It’s Like To Be Aliveafter Django BatesI remember the nights, and the sounds of the nights,and the moon and … More

A MorningI have carried it with me each day: that morning I tookmy uncle’s boat from the brown water coveand … More