In The Poetry

I don’t have very good regionally macho qualifications, about where I came from, which is on the Kent-Surrey border, and my father was a prep-school master, and my mother was the matron, and we lived in a flat above the school, and it was actually pretty soft; but I have since found myself living [...]

Ghazals are an old Persian form, and they’re written in self-contained couplets with a monorhyme, sometimes one- (or two- or three-) word repeated phrase, like a refrain, and the last couplet is a signature couplet, in which the writer has to refer to themselves by name, or pseudonym, or by using some kind of wordplay [...]

Every religion has its fanatics and every religion has its wise voices but they’re not as frequently or as loudly heard. It’s the Talmud that says “Ambition destroys the heart it lives in”, it was Mohammed who said “The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr” and it’s my [...]

Hypnopaedia

As I expounded The Man With the Blue Guitar
my students outwitted me.

Eyes glazed, or averted, they declined
to pick up a single question,
forcing me to drone alone. I was so boring
I fell asleep.

Then a little way off
through the opaque white screens in my head
I started to make out a voice.
It was expounding The Man With the [...]

This is a far-off place in the North of Ireland called Desertmartin.

Desertmartin

At noon, in the dead centre of a faith,
Between Draperstown and Magherafelt,
This bitter village shows the flag
in a baked absolute September light.
Here the Word has withered to a few
Parched certainties, and the charred stubble
Tightens like a black belt, a crop of Bibles.

Because this is [...]

This poem is one I wrote after reading a book about the Crimean War and in particular about the Charge of the Light Brigade. I was told by this book of a little detail about a dog that accompanied the horses as they made their charge and it seemed to me to say something touching [...]

This is almost a transcription rather than an original poem.

What The Chairman Told Tom
Poetry? It’s a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

It’s not work. You dont sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.

Art, that’s opera; or repertory –
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus.

But to ask for twelve pounds a week – [...]

This poem is called ‘Walking Wounded’

A mammoth morning moved grey flanks and groaned.
In the rusty hedges pale rags of mist hung;
The gruel of mud and leaves in the mauled lane
Smelled sweet, like blood. Birds had died or flown,
Their green and silent attics sprouting now
With branches of leafed steel, hiding round eyes
And ripe grenades ready to [...]

Wall

The wall walks the fell –
Grey millipede on slow
Stone hooves;
Its slack back hollowed
At gulleys and grooves,
Or shouldering over
Old boulders
Too big to be rolled away.
Fallen fragments
Of the high crags
Crawl in the walk of the wall.

A dry-stone wall
Is a wall and a wall,
Leaning together
(Cumberland-and-Westmorland
Champion wrestlers),
Greening and weathering,
Flank by flank,
With filling of rubble
Between the two –
A [...]

Billy McBone

Billy McBone
Had a mind of his own,
Which he mostly kept under his hat.
The teachers all thought
That he couldn’t be taught,
But Bill didn’t seem to mind that.

Billy McBone
Had a mind of his own,
Which the teachers had searched for for years.
Trying test after test,
They still never guessed
It was hidden between his ears.

Billy McBone
Had a mind of [...]