In The Poetry

This is ‘A Minute’s Silence’, written in an elegiac metre. I wrote it after being struck by how awesome a well-observed silence can actually be. I think there’s a history of silence in poetry, and as far as I can tell it began with the Romantics – so I’m thinking of things [...]

Everyone knows that America is a continent but few Europeans realize the various and diverse parts of this land. The Saginaw Valley where I was born had been great lumbering country in the 1880s. It is very fertile flat country in Michigan and the principal towns, Saginaw and Flint, lie at the northern edge of [...]

‘At the Grave of Asa Benveniste’ – Asa Benveniste was a Jewish poet from New York who spent the last years of his life in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire and when he died in the early 90s his widow, Agneta Falk, managed to fulfill his wish that he should be buried in Heptonstall churchyard and [...]

Another poem, really about aging. It’s called ‘Who’s Joking with the Photographer? Photographs of Myself Approaching Seventy”

Not my final face, a map of how to get there.
Seven ages, seven irreversible layers, each
subtler and more supple than a snake’s skin.
Nobody looks surprised when we slough off one
and begin to inhabit another.
Do we exchange them whole [...]

Tell of the Sad Derangement of the Mind

for Harold Pinter

Tell of the sad derangement of the mind.
The wheat is being harvested. The sun
Shines on the bales, unclouded, unconfined.
Work as brisk as hard is being done.
Cider’s drunk at night. Documents are signed.
The bedrooms warm. No licences on fun.
Tell of the sad derangement of the mind.
Tell [...]

The Farrier

Blessing himself with his apron,
the leather black and tan of a rain-beaten bay,
he pinches a roll-up to his lips and waits

for the mare to be led from the field to the yard,
the smoke slow-turning from his mouth
and the wind twisting his sideburns in its fingers.

She smells him as he passes, woodbine, metal and hoof,
careful [...]

Catmint Tea

The cat and I are quite alike, these winter nights:
I consult thesauruses; he forages for mice.
He prowls the darkest corners, while I throw the dice
Of rhyme and rummage through the OED’s delights.

He’s all ears and eyes and whiskery antennae
Bristling with the whispered broadcast of the stars,
And I have cruised the ocean of [...]

Sun Pictorial

How formal and polite,
How grave they look, burdened with earnest thoughts,
In all these set-up sepia stills,
Almost as if, embarrassed and contrite
To be caught practising their fatal skills,
They’d stepped aside from slaughter for these other shots.

The American Civil War,
The first war captured by the photograph
In real time. Even the dead
Seem somehow decorous, less to deplore
The [...]

My eldest brother is a doctor – I was a schoolboy when he was a medical student and one day he came back from working in the operating theatre in Cardiff when he was a dresser to a well-known brain surgeon by the name of Lambert Rogers. He came back as I say and told [...]

Birmingham River

Where’s Birmingham river? Sunk.
Which river was it? Two. More or less.

History: we’re on our tribal ground. When they
moved in from the Trent, the first English

entered the holdings and the bodies of the people
who called the waters that kept them alive

Tame, the Dark River, these English spread their works
southward then westward, then all ways

for thirty-odd [...]