In The Poetry

I See You Dancing, Father

No sooner downstairs after the night’s rest
And in the door
Than you started to dance a step
In the middle of the kitchen floor.

And as you danced
You whistled.
You made your own music
Always in tune with yourself.

Well, nearly always, anyway.
You’re buried now
In Lislaughtin Abbey
And whenever I think of you

I go back beyond the old [...]

The Master of the Cast Shadow

Some painters leave shadow out. The Master hunts it
From the source of light to where the last
Faint filigree fingertip falls,
Unthinking as a sundial.

We each inherit our shadow, our ration of darkness,
That shrivels and spreads as light walks here and there.

They don’t see us, these sad mediaeval faces,
With their crosses, their [...]

Spinnings

We’ve come this way before -
haven’t we? – the lanes wet, deepening
the burgundy squelch

of leaves, and the hedges plotting
an articulate sky.
It’s all much closer now: the gravel path,

the spade lying by the open
barn, squints of spider floss tightening across
our eyes. Clues, yes, all of these –

but what about [...]

Billie Holiday

and did it frighten you
that stench in the dark heart of the flower
you pinned behind your ear

and did your skull eat out through your beauty
every time they pressed their faces in you
seeing in your drowning face how their flesh collapsed inside you
and how the pure note hardened like a child
and wouldn’t give in you
even [...]

I’ve written a lot of poems about my ancestors – I’m fascinated by family history – and sometimes you get a story that’s passed down by oral transmission – you’re not quite sure who the person was, or exactly where it was set – you just know that it’s somebody in your family and that’s [...]

The Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the [...]

I wrote these little rhymes as a sort of a joke – I didn’t mean them to be serious at all and I’m not sure I even meant them to be published. But I gave them my publisher and the wonderful Quentin Blake started illustrating them and I was absolutely astonished by their success.

Little Red [...]

What is Poetry

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believe it. In school
All the thought got [...]

A Tunnel

A tunnel, unexpected. The carriage lights
we didn’t notice weren’t on prove their point
and a summer’s day is cancelled out, its greens
and scattered blue, forgotten in an instant

that lasts the width of a down, level to level,
a blink in London to Brighton in Four Minutes
that dampens mobiles – conversations end
mid-sentence, before speakers can [...]

Blues for Titania

The beetle runs into the future. He takes
to his heels in an action so frantic its
flicker seems to possess the slowness of deep
water. He has been green. He will be so yet.
His memory ripples emeralds. The wasp
takes it easy. She unpicks her fabric of
yellow and black, which slips from her fingers to
land in [...]