Poem: An Anchor

First published in Miracle, Tuesday 15th July 2014

Two of my poems have been published in the most recent issue of Miracle, an online and print-on-demand literary and art magazine.

The theme is 'Cage', which I interpreted liberally.

Here is one of them:

An anchor

You drew an I♥U

on my trouser leg. You

linked the letters so it looked more

like a Popeye tattoo. I let you

because these trousers are old and,

as you say, it’ll probably

come out in the wash.

Read both poems in Miracle's 'Cage' issue >>

Poem: Hilda Horsley’s Alarm Clock

Published on The Missing Slate, Tuesday 6 May

My first published poem appears on The Missing Slate as their Poem of the Week.Inspired by the World War I Centenary and a desire to see it not just from the point of view of the men fighting but the women affected at home, it is from the point of view of Hilda Horsley, a 17 year old dressmaker in Hartlepool in 1914. She was the first civilian and the first female casualty of the First World War, when the Germans shelled Hartlepool on 16th December 1914.

The bell sings       no more. A tooth

chipped, no cheshire cat

smile.    ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!’ It isn’t half

gawkey. The clock’s     face

scarred worse than         mine

when they found me, a       yawning

gape                                      ripped

straight through its afternoon

or dead                   of night.

At eight o’clock in the morning a piece

of shrapnel burrowed its tick into the small

intestine, like clockwork. The ground

shook still, and worried

the dinger into a frenzy of chattering

fit now only for hysterics.

I fumbled

the key in the shrunken lock with needle-

thin hands. Perhaps if the clock

had only broken

earlier I might have over-          slept

not been buried beneath

the clemmies of the front door

with that sound                ringing

out the blood from my    soaking

clothed                     bones.

Hilda Horsley's Alarm Clock on The Missing Slate >>

Seamus Heaney: we can be consoled that 'Death's edge/ Blunts on the narcotic strumming' of his words

Seamus Heaney, one of the greatest poets of our time - his is the death not only of a naturalist at one with the natural world, but of a lyricist, a balladeer of our times who was gifted with the grace of rendering our political, ecological and personal upheavals with a deft, melodic turn of phrase. His words were as the birds to whom St Francis preached: they 'Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played/ And sang, like images took flight [...] His argument true, his tone light.'

His poetic soul will endure and be remembered for its brilliance, but he will also be remembered as a great and good man. To use Heaney's own phrase, ‘in his presence, time rode easy’, anchored on his mild humility and generous embrace of all people. All who knew him have attested to this: 'a joy to be with and a warm and caring friend' Bill Clinton; ‘a very humble, modest man' Jimmy Deenihan, Irish Arts minister; 'a person of truly exceptional grace and intelligence' former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion; 'He wore his huge wisdom very lightly and he gave so generously of his time' Bishop of Derry Dr Edward Daly.

We can be consoled that Heaney's words will remain as a testament both to his virtuosic poetic skill and to his generosity of spirit. In The Folk Singers, he acknowledges that 'Death's edge/ Blunts on the narcotic strumming' - we can rest assured that people will be strumming to his tune for generations to come, and finding solace in the enduring quality of his ‘time-turned words’.

To read my Southbank Centre blog post on Heaney’s death, see here.

Guardian Witness, A Book That Changed Me: T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems

In praise of T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems
On Guardian Witness

Every dreary day that I walk over London Bridge with hoardes of city workers streaming towards me in their grey suits, against a grey sky, I think of T.S. Eliot’s crowd who ‘flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many’.

In this he encapsulates a sense of banal futility that still pervades our world now, and yet when I think of his Selected Poems I do not think of them negatively. To me they are full of necessary realism, of perfectly articulated truth and, ultimately, of hope.

I once read 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' aloud to myself, sitting at my kitchen table at the age of 21, panicking about what to do with my life. It made me feel so calm, so accepting of the fact that we cannot squeeze the universe into a ball and know what to do with it, that my panic receded into unexpected contentment. The commonplace elegance of his words, the utter joy in linguistic play and the profound, enduring resonance of his words turns even the most depressing of thoughts into beauty. It makes the things that sadden me in this world seem but fragments within a more positive whole.

To read on Guardian Witness, see here.
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From Tintern Abbey to Hobbiton - Celebrating Literary Britain

Retrospective on Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands

British Library, May - September 2012

Reading The Casual Vacancy got me thinking about British types and stereotypes, and about visiting Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands at the British Library last month. The very experience of wandering through the exhibition made me feel inescapably British... Averting my eyes when the mobile ringtone splintered the almost unnatural hush of the sacred exhibition space. Stoically shivering against the cold of the air temperature control systems, set low enough to preserve both the precious manuscripts and the icicled visitors. But most of all, I felt British because the displays brought alive something essential in our nation: its idealised celebration of the countryside, its quiet outrage at and adaptive acceptance of industrial revolution, its unexpected subversion in the secretive vitality of the suburbs.

The themes of Writing Britain (Rural Dreams, Cityscapes, Wild Places, London, Edges and Waterlands) led you on a purposeful meander through the contours of Britain’s literary identity, and showed how that identity has been sculpted and eroded by the spaces and places in which our poets and writers have moulded their words.

The most appealing elements of the exhibition for me were the manuscripts and artworks on display, and the often symbiotic relationship between the two. Visitors do not suffer from the blindness Wordsworth fears in ‘Tintern Abbey’, as the curators have provided two evocative paintings to enhance our appreciation of his pantheistic masterpiece. Lewis Carroll’s manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground is wonderfully illuminated by his illustration of a grotesque, full-lipped, squat-limbed Queen of Hearts.

It was a shame that these sometimes weren’t exploited to their full potential. JRR Tolkein’s picturesque watercolour evocation of Hobbiton (see image at top of page) would have benefitted hugely from the presence of the text next to it, even in published form in the absence of a manuscript from the library’s archives. The modern take on Heart of Darkness as a graphic novel would have been enriched had Conrad’s text been laid next to it for direct comparison.

The absence of transcriptions next to some manuscripts also detracted slightly from the exhibition, often from a purely semantic point of view. Possibly the rationale was to present the historical artefact as it existed at the time of creation, but the effect of this was to frustrate when you couldn’t actually read the beauty of Keats’s words in ‘To Ailsa Rock’ as clearly as you could perceive it in the accompanying artist’s rendering.

But what struck me most potently was the surprisingly ephemeral quality of the contents of the exhibition, a sense of their fragility and their existence very much as entities of the past. And perhaps this is indeed because of the absence of those anchoring transcriptions, providing liberation from our constant need for modernisation, clarification and easy-to-digest information.

Because I visited the exhibition with the expectation of being faced with resoundingly physical objects which would impress upon me the fundamental endurance of literature, embodying its original inscription on the page. And of course the endurance of literature was palpable, but I emerged with an irresistible sense of wonder at the relative insubstantiality of these works of art; it is the simple jotting of a few lines on a piece of paper that have transmuted into the monumental printed texts we read today. It overwhelmed me to see Blake’s ‘London’ and ‘Tyger Tyger’ crammed into opposite corners of one battered notebook leaf, poems that were to become some of the most famous of the Romantic age.

So, to come back to the stereotypes of the British: comical, bathetic and, in the case of the social condemnation embodied in Rowling’s new novel, sometimes unpleasant. This exhibition reminded me that there is counterbalance to the stereotype, a multi-faceted culture of literary celebration and experimentation that the British Library honoured in this, quintessentially nostalgic, understated and considered exhibition. 

For what was included in the exhibition, see here.