In The Poetry

Serpentine

Those buried lidless eyes can see
the infra-red heat of my blood.

I feel the crack, the whisper
as vertebrae ripple and curve.

Days of absolute stillness.
I sleep early and well.

His rare violent hunger,
a passion for the impossible.

He will dislocate his jaw
to hold it.

My fingers trace the realignment
as things fall back into place.

Each season, a sloughed skin
intensifies the colours [...]

In the 1920s before the dangers of radium were known it was used in all kinds of things from children’s toys to luminous paint. And this is the story of some women who worked in a New Jersey factory making clock faces.

The Innocence of Radium

With a head full of Swiss clockmakers,
she took a job at [...]

I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy in a place as I was in the Arctic, midwinter. The landscape had been simplified by darkness and snow but was actually full of traces of colour and light. And the most thrilling moment was towards the end of the day when there would be a kind [...]

If I write about anything in particular I write about how we see and how we try to see and this poem came out of a journey I made by ferry at night in which I thought there would be nothing to look at.

Night Photograph

Crossing the Channel at midnight in winter,
coastline develops as distance grows,
then [...]