In The Poetry

‘Reading Stevens in the Bath’ is perhaps best described as a deranged song of praise to Wallace Stevens, set in a place he certainly never visited: Newcastle upon Tyne.

Reading Stevens in the Bath

It is Newcastle at evening. It is far
From the furnished banks of the coaly Tyne
But close beside the hidden and infernal banks

Of the [...]

‘Cousin Coat’ is about an invisible coat which I eventually discovered I’d been wearing all my life and was not allowed to remove. It’s an historical coat and perhaps is best imagined as having at some time spent about fifty or a hundred years lying at the bottom of the Aire Navigation Canal soaking [...]

‘Postcards from the Rain God’is a series of about a dozen brief, dramatic lyrics, I suppose, about rain in various Northern settings, and the eleventh of them is dedicated to Peter Didsbury, a fellow poet, on his fiftieth birthday – he is a great pluviophile.

from Postcards to the Rain God
for Peter Didsbury on his fiftieth [...]

Essay on Snow

We have been here before, but not often.
With the blue snow lying on the shaded roofs
And the city beyond them
Lying open, miles of it, with no one there -

Untrodden parks and freezing underpasses.
The statuary anonymous, the cobbled chares
Like streams of blackened ice.
There is a bird somewhere. Its voice

Is like chipping an icicle,
Damping the [...]