In The Poetry

Every year the curlews would come back to the land of Mynydd Bach. They’d always return at the beginning of March and every year I would try to capture the haunting cry in words.

Curlew

The curve of its cry -
A sculpture
Of the long beak:
A spiral carved from bone.

It is raised
quickening
From the ground,
Is wound high, and again [...]

In the years following the death of my friend and colleague Les Arnold in 1992 I wrote a poem in 31 parts which is based in part upon the Cotswold landscape looking towards the chalk of Salisbury Plain and that centres upon Arnolds Wood – a small area of woodland that I and his family [...]

From early on, from boyhood, I was haunted by chalk landscapes which I first saw from the back of my parents’ car. Many years later I looked at paintings by Paul Nash who was also obviously haunted by the same and similar chalk landscapes. This poem is called ‘Landscape of the Daylight Moon’.

Landscape of the [...]

In recent years I’ve returned in a poem to the area where I was born at Warsash near the Hamble River between Southampton and Portsmouth.

Strawberry Field

First, the old smell,
salt on the air, brings back
the river, mud-banks, shingle
thatched with weed and straw.
Crabshells. Tarred feathers.

A black-headed gull -

one is enough to transport you
over the river onto a [...]