New Year Letter

Dear Anthony (I will never get used to calling you Tony) Here are some words of advice from your nearing-fifty-year-old … More

The most read Lifesaving Poems of 2013

These are the most read Lifesaving Poems posts of 2013. Mary Oliver, ‘The Journey’ I first read this on … More

Two readings stood out for me in 2013. The first was at an arts centre in the middle of nowhere … More

In the spring of 1998 I wrote to Seamus Heaney. I asked him to consider writing a Foreword to the … More

A comment Mark Robinson made in the days following Seamus Heaney’s death in August resonated with me. He said he … More

I became interested in Robert Lowell’s poetry because of the criticism of Seamus Heaney. I had tried reading him before, … More

Wind This house has been far out at sea all night,The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,Winds stampeding the … More

‘A Lyric Afterwards’ was the poem in which I finally got Tom Paulin. I had been given a tape of him … More

Early Summer Small things get lost now;There are intrusions,Defeats in alien worlds. This is the time to slide a foolish … More

I think my first bout of Poetry Exhaustion occurred sometime after my A levels. Our English paper was quite advanced for its … More

Some time ago I wrote about the importance to me of discovering, through my friend Duncan Kramer, the anthology The … More

One year I decided that I would decorate one of my teaching rooms with my collection of Poems on the … More

I treated myself to Seth Godin‘s newish book The Icarus Deception recently. It is both dense and light, profound and easy to … More

I want to live – Sharon Olds The most intense reading group I ever belonged to wasn’t really a reading … More

The funniest thing you will ever read about Elizabeth Bishop (or teaching, or anything else) is Mark Halliday‘s essay Moose … More

Norman MacCaig’s ‘Aunt Julia’ was the first poem I remember reading which made me think ‘I need to do this’. … More

I came across ‘Elegy for Jane’ having found poems by Theodore Roethke in Ted Hughes’ classic anthology of poems and … More

I have written before that there are a wide range of reasons for including the poems I have in my … More