In The Poetry

My father took part in the D Day landings and this poem describes what happened to him on that day and subsequently in Germany during the Second World War but in fact is set in England and remembers a time when I was talking to him about the war.

Veteran

Across the field, the wood
shudders under lilac [...]

In the house where I grew up we didn’t have very many books, or spend very much time talking about reading or about what books might contain. But one of the books I did know was The Diary of Anne Frank and in my early twenties I went to visit her house in Amsterdam [...]

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 [...]