In The Poetry

Once, quite by accident, I opened a Bible with a postcard stuck in it at the story of Judith in the Apocrypha. Judith was the Jewish heroine who saved the Jews by killing Holofernes who was the general of the army besieging them. She dressed up as a prostitute and went to his tent and [...]

Slow Reader

He can make sculptures
and fabulous machines,
invent games, tell jokes,
give solemn, adult advice -
but he is slow to read.
When I take him on my knee
with his Ladybird book
he gazes into the air,
sighing and shaking his head
like an old man
who knows the mountains
are impassable.

He toys with words,
letting them go cold
as gristly meat,
until I relent
and let him [...]

Once, quite by accident, I opened a Bible with a postcard stuck in it at the story of Judith in the Apocrypha. Judith was the Jewish heroine who saved the Jews by killing Holofernes who was the general of the army besieging them. She dressed up as a prostitute and went to his tent and [...]

By the time I came to writing my second book, The Handless Maiden, I’d got a lot braver. And one of the poems in it is a poem about marigolds. There’s a whole tradition of writing poems comparing women to flowers, mostly by male poets. It’s a sort of flattery – women are beautiful like [...]

Slow Reader

He can make sculptures
and fabulous machines,
invent games, tell jokes,
give solemn, adult advice -
but he is slow to read.
When I take him on my knee
with his Ladybird book
he gazes into the air,
sighing and shaking his head
like an old man
who knows the mountains
are impassable.

He toys with words,
letting them go cold
as gristly meat,
until I relent
and let him [...]

I lived in Brixton in central London for twenty years and though I sometimes heard gunshots I never actually saw a gun. But now living in Lanarkshire, Scotland, right in the middle of the country I see lots of guns. Almost all the men seem to have a shotgun. And then my own husband got [...]