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BuiltWithNOF

 

      Publications

     

    Magazines in which more than 100 poems have been published include :

    Acumen, Agenda, Ambit, Assent, Critical Quarterly, Coffee House, Envoi, Equinox, Frogmore, Interpreter's House, Iota, Links, Magma, New Welsh Review, The North, Orbis, Outposts, Poetry Nottingham, Poetry Review, Stand, The Shop, Seam, Smith's Knoll, Stand, Staple, The Times, The Wolf, Wordplay, “14”.

     

     

    Poems

     

  • Sea Wall, Overy Staithe: written for N. Norfolk project, Between the Land and the Sea
  • Fire: published  in Salaams
  • Need Blossoms into all its Compensations: Ambit 202, Autumn 2010
  • The Inscrutables: The Interpreter’s House 45, Autumn 2010
  • Scotch & Soda: published by Magma
  • Sunny Green Sea: published in Magma

 

    Sea Wall, Overy Staithe            DSC0115402

    Running  I become
    the bank’s long legs
    and bendy knees
    Sometimes I outwit time 
    a quickening into the moment
    knowing every step
    will take me
    somewhere different

    Travellers with tripods
    forks for worm-digging
    with picnics   rucksacks   guns
    the cyclists and the day-trippers
    have met my several selves -
    patters of early footprints
    loosing energy into the dunes
    where space  opens   up

    Sturdy Dutch
    with weather-beaten faces
    shovelled on the soil
    and now again
    workmen slap grey clay emulsion on
    strip back to bones
    the mallows  clover  chamomile
    Enthroned on the digger’s caterpillar tracks
    the driver browses dailies
    to the radio’s lunch-time croon

    I am the length and breadth
    of what’s unchanged
    am lapwing (disappearing)
    butterflies in spiral
    acrobat (my shadow)
    natterjack (my song)
    windslam across the saltings
    beneath enormous skies

    Voices are silent
    trees that bore the dog rose
    and the tiny self-sown apples
    gone
    Still  I  run 
    look backwards and look forwards

    Allow this poem 
    to carry you beyond

    Fire

    Today the rose-bay willows flush
    through ragwort into innocence of sky.
    Pods explode to bottle-brushes, fly
    away their floss. Flame turns to ash.

    Bursting where harmless grass
    is kindled and charred, fireweed sings
    to sun in thrusts of coloured rings,
    changes like stripy caterpillars.

    Ep-il-o-bi-um, the child
    writes cursive, feeling the ping of sound
    on palate. Mixing mauvish pink. Bound
    by circumstances and shape, she holds
    her breath till almost faint before (impelled
    to dip) she colours tongues, lips, wounds.

     

    Need blossoms into its Compensations

     When does a berry break upon the tongue
    sweeter than when you long to taste it?

    How can lilac quiver the nostril
    before the bloom blows on the wind?

    Even a dream of Emma Kirkby singing Mozart
    opens up a garden like the spring.

    Touching you - anywhere will do -
    is precious in your absence as the sun.

 

    The Inscrutables

    Heads tilted back, feet pointed down
    they could have run on sand and left no trace.
    But love, you understand, goes on and on,
    each holds its secrets in a pale flat face.

    They could have run on sand and left no trace.
    Cycladic images slip into my mind,
    each holds its secrets in a pale flat face,
    arms folded on its chest, like you, my friend.

    Cycladic images slip into my mind,
    then you in your caring bed, a deity,
    arms folded on your chest, my friend,
    stoic and timeless as the slipping sea.

    You in your caring bed a deity,
    head tilted back, feet pointed down,
    stoic and timeless as the slipping sea
    while love, you understand, goes on and on.

 

    Scotch & Soda

    Two phrases only are necessary for a whole evening of
    English conversation. 'Scotch and soda?' and 'Why not?'
       
                                                                               J-P Sartre

    Scotch and soda, says the rumpled little man with large lenses,
    and a mangled accent. Stepping from the lectern,
    the intellectual liberator adjusts his check scarf.
    He craves a drink. Why not? He can't speak English
    and needs a woman. He drinks if he fancies one. Scotch and soda?
    Drinks when he's with one and has to leave. Why not?
    the human being is free and utterly responsible.
    He drinks too much, he overworks: Il faut tout essayer.
    He abuses his body: Scotch and soda?
    Drink less, smoke less, doctors warn.
    He won't be lectured. He ignores them. Why not?
    Scotch and soda: alternating never fails.
    There are many women in his life, why not?
    But they become helpless: they depend on him like Scotch
    on soda. Meeting one at a time, he lets his hands wander.
    He lies to them all. Why not? By alternating
    it is impossible to make a mistake.
     

    Sunny Green Sea

    Do we continually  cross
    some place between what we say and what we feel,
    slipping among green fingers, white fingers?

    The artist peers inside the human head fishing up
    smashed images of stained glass,
    shadows that swallow a face.

    Other times he walks right in
    extracts a sailor
    clasping a fish as if it were his truth.

    The spectator moves from the story we inhabit
    to what is real
    not so much amid destruction

    as at the building of a new world,
    yet weedy strands
    disturb the boundaries that overlap

    in speckled silver
    like shoals of whitebait after new grazings
    beneath a skim of light

     

  • Competitions

Three highly commendeds at competitions are from The Plough, Amnesty and York 2004.

 

 

Public Reading

In 2002  at the Poetry Festival at Wells-next-the-Sea.

In 2008 at Poetry Wivenhoe

In 2009 with Ambit at Bath House, Dean Street

At North House Gallery

In 2010 with Ambit at the Owl & Pussycat

 

 

  • Chapbooks

 

First Chapbook

  Swimming Lessons (Cidesterna, 2002/5,
£6.95, ISBN 1 899604 27 8)
is a sequence of poems in the voices of a mother and her daughter, charting their relationship through adolescence, anorexia and her death of cancer at the age of 42. 'The poems are spare, quiet and unsentimenatal, with a restless, rigorous honesty about them.'

Eleven of the poems provided the basis for a play twice broadcast on Radio 4, in September 2005 and 2006.

The Pamphlet is available from the author or Hawthorn Press, 11-12 Websters Yard, Syderstone, Norfolk PE31 8SJ.

 

 

Second Chapbook

 

 

 

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Anthologies

Light Unlocked, Christmas Card Poems, Enitharmon, 2005

 Soundswrite Anthology, Soundswrite Press, 2005 & 2006

Poetry Wivenhoe, 2008

 

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