In The Poetry

Kiss

He’s gone. She can’t believe it, can’t go on.
She’s going to give up painting. So she paints
Her final canvas, total-turn-off
Black. One long
Obsidian goodbye.
A charcoal-burner’s Smirnoff,
The mirror of Loch Ness
Reflecting the monster back to its own eye.

But something’s wrong. Those mad
Black-body particles don’t sing
Her story of despair, the steel and
Garnet spindle
Of the storm.
This black has everything [...]

This poem came out of a commission I had from the VA museum to write about an object in its British galleries. And I asked for two objects because, extraordinarily, a tapestry which Mary Queen of Scots made over seventeen years in captivity, until she was executed by Elizabeth I, her cousin, has ended [...]

This poem is called ‘Pilot Light’, and I’m thinking of the image of the Virgin as Star of the Sea which guides sailors on a dark night, but it begins with the image of sex as a kind of cowboy bare-back show, and it ends with the image from Homer of Odysseus in the sea [...]

The next poem does come out of art, in a way; it came from the introduction by Richard Gombrich to a book about the history of shadows, of cast shadows, in painting. But I was interested in the idea of shadow as a guide to you when you don’t know what is happening to [...]