In The Poetry

Note from the Outside

Here are busy streets of fish,
dead tower-blocks squatted by gulls.

When they dropped me off at the wood’s edge
I was stammered by green,
I was torn to rags by the silence.
I walked like a bent pin,
stubbing my toes on the emptiness.

Remember that library book about the ocean?
You should see the night sky:
its buoys and [...]

Reading Leaves

A change of wind brings a few foreign leaves,
skimming the hedge and the dustbins,
landing on my lawn like splashes of blood.
I pick one up and try to read it, but the message
is in a language of reds I can’t decipher.
Its texture is of folded money, suggesting
a climate of plenty, wild parrots, a generous sky.

I [...]

Ice on the Beach

One single sheet of sprung light.
Touched here with the toe of your boot
it hurts in a distant part.

Dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic.
Striking it with a stick raises
a shocked note, a white bruise under the skin -

the physiology of ice on sand
is strange, we have not mapped it.
The sea can only [...]

I was born and brought up in Burton-on-Trent, a brewing town in the English Midlands. It’s the hardness of the water, its particular mix of dissolved minerals, that makes it suitable for brewing beer. This poem makes use of a couple of Burton expressions, the traditional greeting “Hey up me duck” and the [...]

I wanted to write about a saint who was not only a model of virtue but also fully human. It seemed a shame to me that in order to be good enough, saints had to renounce the things that make life worth living. So this poem is about a saint with a sex life.

Holy

It [...]