In The Poetry

This is from ‘Punch’s Day Book’

‘There are those who plan to die
blameless, open-handed, an unwritten letter.
We can’t aspire to that.
We lack the pure compulsion and the nerve.

The orchard’s harvested; the stoves are lit
to burn all winter; the house is steeped
in a musty odour of fruit.
Think how it is
to own nothing, to carry nothing
from one place [...]

Legion is my most recent collection of poems – it was published this year, 2005. It’s divided into three sections, and the title sequence consists of voices from a fictitious war zone.
These poems ambushed me; I’m not a public poet and never have been, in fact I tend to mistrust issue-driven poetry. [...]

Legion is my most recent collection of poems – it was published this year, 2005. It’s divided into three sections, and the title sequence consists of voices from a fictitious war zone.
These poems ambushed me; I’m not a public poet and never have been, in fact I tend to mistrust issue-driven poetry. [...]

This poem, from ‘Legion’, is called ‘Sniper’.

I am tucked up here out of sight. I am tucked up here
in the bell-tower of Our Lady of Retribution: my own space
well-stocked and arranged just so. This tower was raised in the year
blank-blank, the year of the crow, the year of our disgrace.
I am tucked up here in [...]

My eighth book, Marriage, contained two sequences; the first was very loosely based on the relationship between the painter Pierre Bonnard and his lifelong companion and model Marthe de Meligny. I came to see that the sequence is concerned, as are many of Bonnard’s paintings, with what lies beneath the surfaces of the quotidian, [...]

This poem from Legion is called ‘Finisterre’.

That slim isthmus where one sea beats on the southern shore,
another sea at the northern, is called by.sailors and strangers Finisterre
or, sometimes, Terra Nada. It was there,
on that cold strip of rock and broom and bright rag-weed that four
hundred were run to ground,
motherless sons, widowers, the orphans of orphans, [...]