I haven’t posted here in a while, I actually took the blog ‘private’ for a few months, after a conversation with Catherine Smith about poets and blogging… she argued strongly for poets retaining a certain mystique and not baring their souls to all and sundry (or their weekly shop, or what they thought of theRead more ⟶
Category: Mags & Blogs
When my sister is old
I will wait at the door with flowers if she greets me at all it will be brief and cold as the Guildford house where the stairs stayed uncarpeted and the kitchen unmodernised, names and numbers taped on walls, coats and boots crammed under stairs. Her back will be bent like our mother’s, she willRead more ⟶
Invasion
It took three rows of barbed wire coiled round stakes, hammered at angles into sand and shingle. The beach packed and leaking like keddle nets of cockles in green buckets, for six summers. Wading off in gumboots, baitdiggers beyond the rocks held occasional wakes, observed by boys belly-down in the dunes with binoculars, swapping quietRead more ⟶
The ups and downs of poetry submissions
Last week: issue 48 of The North failed to arrive, and when I asked for my ‘contributor’s copy’ I was told…erm… you’re not a contributor. The poem they’d asked for back in July 2011 had gone astray, and never made it into the issue. Boo! And now the next issue isn’t until October. Boo! ButRead more ⟶
River Ouse, Rodmell, 1941
The first she prises out, clenched in bindweed: reluctance adds to its appeal. And there: not so large as to burst pockets, several flints conspire their surfaces glass-perfect, all the better to slip in without fuss. From mud, she frees a stump of the fat chalk Down walked each day, as worn as the worstedRead more ⟶