In The Poetry

I keep a picture of my favourite phobia on the door of my study. It’s a fear of a road with a drop on one side, a corniche. And this poem is taken from that picture – it’s called ‘The Annals of Sheer’.

The Annals of Sheer

Like a crack across a windscreen
this Alpine sheep track winds
around [...]

‘The Last Hellos’ – a poem I wrote just three months after my father died in 1994. It’s written in the kind of rough bush working man’s language that we spoke to each other.

The Last Hellos

Don’t die, Dad -
but they die.

This last year he was wandery:
took off a new chainsaw blade
and cobbled a spare from [...]

‘Bats’ Ultrasound’ was the ancestor of a whole sequence of poems of mine called Translations from the Natural World. Bats live in a world of radar beyond our hearing and I wanted to get a sense of that ultrasound so the last six lines of this poem are in English, but they’re in bat English.
Bats’ [...]

The Tin Wash Dish

Lank poverty, dank poverty,
its pants wear through at fork and knee.
It warms its hands over burning shames,
refers to its fate as Them and He
and delights in things by their hard names:
rag and toejam, feed and paw -
don’t guts that down, there ain’t no more!
Dank poverty, rank poverty,
it hums with a grim fidelity
like [...]

One for St Joseph.

The Pay for Fosterage

The carpenter could have stayed
hunched over, at work on his chagrin,
left everything to the hush-ups
and stone-evadings of women.
He could have escaped the thousands
of years of speculation. The horns.
But all that weakness was behind him.
The courteous presence had spoken
unearthly sense to its equal,
himself. As he would be from now
on into [...]

The Climax of Factory Farming

Farm gates were sealed with tape;
people couldn’t stop shaking their heads.
Out on the fells and low fields
in twilight, it was the Satanic mills
come again: the farm beasts of Britain
being burnt inside walls of their feed.

The Meaning of Existence

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.