In The Poetry

This is a group of poems is taken from my cycle about some of the people, seen from a child’s perspective, living in the lightly disguised village I call Waterslain – that’s an old Norfolk word meaning ‘flooded’. ‘Diz’, Sheila Disney, had a moustache and she used to catch her breakfast with her feet. She [...]

Idling

The way waves fold into themselves, sigh, then
play themselves out high on the foreshore,

a man draws and redraws the crescent contours
of the salt-woman he loves to draw to love.

This is a group of poems is taken from my cycle about some of the people, seen from a child’s perspective, living in the lightly disguised village I call Waterslain – that’s an old Norfolk word meaning ‘flooded’. ‘Diz’, Sheila Disney, had a moustache and she used to catch her breakfast with her feet. She [...]

Idling

The way waves fold into themselves, sigh, then
play themselves out high on the foreshore,

a man draws and redraws the crescent contours
of the salt-woman he loves to draw to love.

The first lines in this poem come from the great Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Battle of Malden’ and they’re spoken by the old warrior, Byrhtwold, after the death of his lord fighting against the Vikings. In the second of my two stanzas I attempt a translation of these and the following lines using only words deriving [...]

The Grain of Things

Beware of what’s uniform, lapidary, slick.

As if a twisting country lane
where shadows bow and curtsy
were to be avoided
because of its green spine and blisters;
or it were desirable
that literary translations should not sound
foreign and close to the originals.

Waxen-skinned fruit is apt
to taste less sweet than the pocked potato
and ruckled pomegranate.

Let me have about [...]

Burnham-Overy-Staithe is a little coastal village in North Norfolk – my grandparents lived there and I returned to live in another of the Burnhams.

Dusk, Burnham-Overy-Staithe

The blue hour ends, this world
floats on a great stillness.

I only guess where marsh
finishes and sky begins,

each grows out of the other.
In the creek a slip

of water gleams. Rowboats
bob and swing [...]