In The Poetry

Yobbos!

With an epigraph from a Pears’ Soap advert from 1899: The first step towards lightening THE WHITE MAN’s burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness.

A right savage I was – sozzled
to the nose with sprightly
Muldoon, squeezed into the communal

sweat of a Saturday tube home -
I’m up to p. 388 of his sharp [...]

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 [...]

The following is about my grandmother, Moser, my mother’s mother who had a set of pink depression glass dishes and its pretty well described in the poem my feelings about these – that glass dishes don’t keep hot fluids hot and so on, but it’s also a poem about the kind of poverty those people [...]

The Stinking Rose

Everything I want to say is
in that name
for these cloves of garlic – they shine
like pearls still warm from a woman’s neck.

My fingernail nudges and nicks
the smell open, a round smell
that spirals up. Are you hungry?
Does it burn through your ears?

Did you know some cloves were planted
near the coral-coloured roses
to provoke the petals
into [...]

People often ask me where I’m from, even in my own country – I seem to have a whole collection of strange anecdotes of people doing that. I’m going to sit down in a pub on a chair in London and this woman went “You cannae sit in that chair. It’s my chair.” And me [...]

On visiting a circus on Clapham Common with a small son.

The Clapham Elephants

We are two mice looking up at a cupboard of shoes
Smelling a dreaded smell of bigness.
The shoes move. Are grey, dwarfing thoughts.
You look pale too, they appal your small head too.

Round and round go the bony foreheads of the thoughts, [...]

In My Two Small Fists

in that bright blue summer
I used to gather
daisies for my father
speedwell for my mother

with buttercups
and prickly heather
cowrie shells
and a seagull’s feather

treasures in each fist
all squashed together
daisies for my father
speedwell for my mother

(that’s how I see it
but I don’t know
if it really happened
[...]

You Were Wearing Blue

the explosions are nearer this evening
the last train leaves for the south
at six tomorrow
the announcements will be in a different language

i chew the end of a match
the tips of my finger and thumb are sticky

i will wait at the station and you
will send a note, i
will read it
it [...]

East Coker

I

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of [...]

I had the good fortune to visit Antarctica some years ago, and I wrote one or two poems down there. I imagined, for example, a polar explorer dying of hypothermia, and then it occurred to me that ‘hypothermia’ sounded like the name of a Greek goddess, so I wrote this poem.

The Polar Explorer’s Love Song

The [...]