In The Poetry

This poem is a commission. It was commissioned by the Tate Gallery in connection with a competition they were running – I was one of the judges – and the subject had to be either a particular painting or work of art in the Tate or the gallery itself in general. And they asked the [...]

I’ve written a lot of poems about my ancestors – I’m fascinated by family history – and sometimes you get a story that’s passed down by oral transmission – you’re not quite sure who the person was, or exactly where it was set – you just know that it’s somebody in your family and that’s [...]

‘Immigrant’ looks back from some years afterwards to the time when I first arrived in London from New Zealand feeling very foreign, in fact very colonial with my New Zealand accent which I hastened to get rid of, and my Marks & Spencers clothes – I was trying to pass as a genuine Londoner like [...]

This poem is a commission. It was commissioned by the Tate Gallery in connection with a competition they were running – I was one of the judges – and the subject had to be either a particular painting or work of art in the Tate or the gallery itself in general. And they asked the [...]

I write quite a lot about death, and poems for people who have died, and this is a poem for a friend of mine called Meg Sheffield who died in 1997. She was very adventurous – she always made me feel like a total wimp – and a lot of the things she did would [...]

This poem is one unique in my experience that came because of the title – in fact the title came to me first – ‘The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers’. And that phrase just popped into my head from somewhere and then I tried to work out what she might be like, this ex-queen. The image [...]