Earlier this year I was on a Poetry School course in Lambeth and met Harry Man. I really liked his work and I think he and I were two of only four participants who completed the course (out of about 15). I came across Harry’s name again recently and had a snoop around the internet,Read more ⟶
Category: Poems
First poetry reading group – Ní Chuilleanáin, Feaver, Wilkinson
There’s nothing quite like reading poetry to stimulate writing – something it took me many years to discover. So I was very pleased when Brighton Stanza member Miriam Patrick proposed a new monthly group devoted to reading poetry. Our first meeting was last night – we were a small but perfectly formed group! The formatRead more ⟶
A feast of first lines
First lines. Ack! It’s worse than a job interview. You have 2 seconds to make an impression. Or something like that. Do you find yourself going back to the first line and re-writing because it’s just not strong enough? And as a reader, do you ever read the first line and immediately your mind saysRead more ⟶
Robert Hamberger’s ‘Being the Sea’ (video post)
You can read this poem in Agenda Vol 46 number 3, ‘Retrospectives’.
At the Plastic Bag Museum
these are the things that carried the stuff that people bought see those loops for hands – handles they’re called naturally they never carried boxes the corners would poke through split sides you can see why empties got crumpled thrust into drawers small thin ones used to pick up dogs’ turds the sturdier ones forRead more ⟶
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 ⟶
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 ⟶