In The Poetry

Isn’t My Name Magical?

Nobody can see my name on me.
My name is inside
and all over me, unseen
like other people also keep it.
Isn’t my name magic?

My name is mine only.
It tells I am individual,
the one special person it shakes
when I’m wanted.

If I’m with hundreds of people
and my name gets called,
my sound switches me on to answer
like [...]

April the Sixteenth

What did they bring to the saint?
The shepherds a fleece.
That winter many lambs were born in the snow.

What did the dark ones bring?
To Magnus the tinkers have brought
A new bright can. Their hammers beat all night.

What have they brought to the saint?
A fishless fisherman
Spread his torn net at the wall of the church.

And [...]

This poem, ‘Expectans Expectavi’, which is the title of a psalm, “I waited patiently for the Lord”, is about waiting, written at the end of the last war when the whole world, really, seemed to be holding its breath for the return of ordinary life, and all the soldiers from overseas, and I thought of [...]

The Park Drunk

He opens his eyes to a hard frost,
the morning’s soft amnesia of snow.

The thorned stems of gorse
are starred crystal; each bud
like a candied fruit, its yellow
picked out and lit
by the low pulse
of blood-orange
riding in the eastern trees.

What the snow has furred
to silence, uniformity,
frost amplifies, makes singular:
giving every form a sound,
an edge, as if
frost [...]

Oleanna

I’d thought you’d get through any disagreement just by talking
by persisting quietly. Fool. Steel-rimmed the hole at the centre
through which all hopes of contact plummet down in flames
as modes of talk criss-cross from opposite directions like jets in flight
which rightly never slow or swerve to read the fleecy trails of others
then something searing wipes its [...]

At several times in my life I’ve suffered from depression – I’ve found that giving the depression an identity helps to deal with those feelings of loss and desolation. It’s a case of naming your enemy in order to fight your corner more powerfully. I call depression a thief.

Thief

He will steal it, whatever you possess.
Whatever [...]

I’ll explain what the poem is about – I’m going to read you one or two very short poems in Scots which will be quite unintelligible I think to all of you unless I explain them. ‘The Watergaw’ – a watergaw is a broken rainbow, a broken shaft of a rainbow that you can see [...]

This poem is about a young woman I worked with very closely. It’s called ‘Come the Morning’ and it goes to the tune of ‘The Trees they Do Grow High’.

As the trees lose all their leaves
evenings close round me
and I think on all the dreams that’s passed
since my young man I seen,
now I must [...]

I was once in New York on St. Patrick’s Day when all the shennanigans go on and I started to wonder, given the number of English people living in New York, what it would be like if they tried to celebrate St. George’s Day in the same style.

The Twang

Well it was St George’s Day in [...]

For some reason I have a great fascination with bad taste. This is one example.

In the Meat-Safe

There is a functional greyness
where the banal, but unusual,
has found a graceless permanence
that only the odd can admire.
Those collectors of cigarette cards
and worthless believe-it-or-not facts,
are the antiquarians of corroded
appliances who worship a dullness
as lonely as the fattest man [...]