In The Poetry

This is called ‘Morning News’ and it was written just about the time of the American pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.

Morning News

Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of bread
and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches,
repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war.
A cinder-block wall shared by two houses
is new rubble. On one side was a [...]

Sometimes poems that were never intended for children get adopted by them. This next poem is one such poem, and it’s called ‘A Small Dragon’.

I’ve found a small dragon in the woodshed.
Think it must have come from deep inside a forest
because it’s damp and green and leaves
are still reflecting in its eyes.

I fed it [...]

This poem is called ‘Parkinson’s Disease’.

Parkinson’s Disease

While spoon-feeding him with one hand
she holds his hand with her other hand,
or rather lets it rest on top of his,
which is permanently clenched shut.
When he turns his head away, she reaches
around and puts in the spoonful blind.
He will not accept the next [...]

Until recently I lived in England’s Lane and opposite our flat there was a service wash, and sometimes I talked to the lady who was officiating. This is dedicated to her.

Urban Lyric

The gaunt lady of the service wash
stands on the threshold and blinks in the sunlight.

Her face is yellow in its frizz of hair
and yet [...]

There’s nothing especially advantageous about being a Scottish poet but it means you can rhyme ‘Bach’ and ‘loch’, and ‘moors’ and ‘conifers’, so we have one or two advantages.

Loch Music

I listen as recorded Bach
Restates the rhythms of a loch.
Through blends of dusk and dragonflies
A music settles on my eyes
Until I hear the living moors,
Sunk stones [...]

Overall, Bloodlines is a verse novel. It’s set in the 1860s in the American south, and it’s really about that time in America just before the Civil War when issues about abolition and about nationhood were being talked about. The narrator – his big thing is he refuses to die until a friendship breaks out [...]

Here’s a little quatrain called:

On Going Deaf

I’ve lost a sense. Why should I care?
Searching myself I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair
And deftly set it, like a snare.

In my 1999 book On the Bus with Rosa Parks – in this sequence, the titular sequence, I speculate not only on Rosa Parks’ historic non-doing, her refusing to give up her seat on the segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 1955, but also speculate on any moment in history when one is suddenly confronted with [...]

In recent years I’ve returned in a poem to the area where I was born at Warsash near the Hamble River between Southampton and Portsmouth.

Strawberry Field

First, the old smell,
salt on the air, brings back
the river, mud-banks, shingle
thatched with weed and straw.
Crabshells. Tarred feathers.

A black-headed gull -

one is enough to transport you
over the river onto a [...]

This is about simply being very tired. It’s called ‘Lochan’.

Lochan

(For Jean Johnstone)

When all this is over I mean
to travel north, by the high

drove roads and cart tracks
probably in June,

with the gentle dog-roses
flourishing beside me. I mean

to find among the thousands
scattered in that land

a certain quiet lochan,
where water lilies rise

like small fat moons,
and tied among the [...]