On Hamburger, Hughes and Heaney
Tacita Dean’s superb 2007 film on Michael Hamburger features no dialogue until the last ten minutes or so, when Hamburger, at a wooden table, discusses the different varieties of apples which he has...
View ArticleOn Michael Hamburger reading his poetry
Thanks to the Poetry Archive, Michael Hamburger’s bewitchingly lugubrious voice can be heard, here, reading three poems not long after his 79th birthday. It’s a meagre number for a poet of such a...
View ArticleNew poem –‘Deauville, 1999’
I’m very pleased to have a poem in a fine new journal, The Fig Tree, edited by Tim Fellows, available here. Each issue will have a featured poet; this time it’s admirable Ian Parks.
View ArticleJanuary and February reading
Not that I’m suddenly verse-averse, but my reading so far this year – Hamburger, James Tate and Mike Barlow aside – has been largely dominated by prose books. Two were Sebald-related: The Emergence of...
View ArticleMichael Hamburger’s centenary day
Today. I doubt Hamburger would’ve wanted much fanfare, but I can’t let it pass. His 2000 collection Intersections (‘Shorter Poems 1994–2000’) included, on facing pages, two of his loveliest poems,...
View ArticleReview of Mike Barlow’s A Land Between Borders
With thanks to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie, my review of Mike Barlow’s latest collection, A Land Between Borders (Templar Poetry), is in this week’s edition of The Friday Poem, here.
View ArticleOn a poem by Siobhán Campbell in Poetry Wales
It might seem odd that, not having eaten meat since 1982, I should become obsessed with something so very meaty, but Siobhán Campbell’s poem ‘Rump’ in the latest issue of Poetry Wales is just the sort...
View ArticleOn Doreen Gurrey’s A Coalition of Cheetahs
I was recently asked to provide some blurb for Doreen Gurrey’s Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition-winning, A Coalition of Cheetahs. It’s a super read, and I described it thus: How...
View ArticleOn Patience Agbabi’s Bloodshot Monochrome
Back in December 2022, I sang the praises, here, of Jackie Wills’ SmithǀDoorstop book, On Poetry*, and noted the excellence of her exegesis of Patience Agbabi’s superb ‘The Doll’s House’, a poem...
View ArticleOn Anna Adams
I have Helena (Nell) Nelson to thank for this, and for permission to quote from her writing. A while back, I was looking through past issues of The North and came across Nell’s appreciation of the...
View ArticleNew poem in Obsessed With Pipework –‘Fire Evacuation Procedure’
Any journal which nods towards Hawkwind in its subtitle – ‘poetry with strangeness and charm’ – is fine by me. I was delighted when editor Charles Johnson accepted my poem below, and very glad to be...
View ArticleMarch–April reading
My fiction-reading splurge earlier this year petered out after a couple of Rupert Thomson novels: after finishing The Insult, a game of two equally engrossing halves, I read Death of a Murderer, in...
View ArticleNew poems – ‘A Short History of Greenhouses’ and ‘Edward Burra at the Gaiety,...
With many thanks to editor (and very fine poet) Robert Selby, I have two new poems up at Wild Court, here. Burra designed sets for several ballet productions, including Helpmann’s Miracle in the...
View ArticleA reading on Thursday 23rd May
A week today, I’ll be on my way to Carlton – near Goole, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, right at the south-eastern extremity of the administrative county of North Yorkshire – to read my poems,...
View ArticleOn Lydia Harris’s ‘This library of forgetting and remembering’
I daresay I’ve paraphrased Orwell thus, or something similar, before: all poets are unique, but some are more unique than others. Lydia Harris certainly falls into this category, thanks to her...
View ArticleMichael Hamburger’s centenary day
Today. I doubt Hamburger would’ve wanted much fanfare, but I can’t let it pass. His 2000 collection Intersections (‘Shorter Poems 1994–2000’) included, on facing pages, two of his loveliest poems,...
View ArticleOn Hugo Hamilton’s Every Single Minute
Taking some books back to the library a few weeks ago, I hadn’t intended to borrow a new lot, but I had an uncanny inkling that I would find something unexpected and fine. I loved Hugo Hamilton’s...
View ArticleMichael Hamburger’s centenary day
Today. I doubt Hamburger would’ve wanted much fanfare, but I can’t let it pass. His 2000 collection Intersections (‘Shorter Poems 1994–2000’) included, on facing pages, two of his loveliest poems,...
View ArticleMay–June reading
Taking some books back to the library a few weeks ago, I hadn’t intended to borrow a new lot, but I had an uncanny inkling that I would find something unexpected and fine. I loved Hugo Hamilton’s...
View ArticleElection time
How wonderful it is to have the Tory clouds lifted from the UK after 14 dark and dreadful years. Yes, Labour won’t be – or be in a position to be – as radical as I and many others would like them to...
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