I’ve decided it’s time to get back to regular posts about weekend poetry reading. I’ve been doing the reading but not finding the time to mention it. This weekend I’m re-reading the truly wonderful sequence of sonnets ‘A Bargain with the Light’, which was one of my favourite books of 2017 and also chosen by…
This weekend I’m going to be reading Martin Figura’s latest, a pamphlet with illustrations by Caroline Wright and Helen Ivory’s Waiting for Bluebeard. I really enjoyed hearing them both read at Toddington Poetry Society on Tuesday. It was worth it even though my car ended up locked into the car park over the road. These…
September always feels like the start of new things and this year I’m going back to studying poetry with the Poetry School and the University of Newcastle. The MA classes start on 26th September and I am so looking forward to it. I am also going to make posting about my reading a more regular…
Having recently discovered the work of Yannis Ritsos, through his Diaries of Exile I’ve been reading a couple of anthologies of work by twentieth century poets from Greece. This is thanks to the Poetry Library on the South Bank in London. I began with Six Modern Greek Poets, edited and translated by John Stathatos and…
Thanks to the Poetry School and John McCullough I spent a Saturday at the end of May ransacking the Natural History Museum for poems. My day began early and I was even offered Prosecco on the train into London after I’d unwittingly joined a hen party as they had a spare seat in their midst. They…
This blog post was going to begin with welcoming the warmer more summery weather and the chance to get out and about but we’ve had heavy rain for the last couple of days and the temperature has dropped. Nonetheless I have been on various writing and poetry excursions recently with more planned for June and…
I’ve been reading novels recently and it has been a while since I wrote about poetry reads so I’m glad to get back to it. I have three poetry books on the go at present; Diaries of Exile by Yannis Ritsos, Memorandum poems for the fallen by Vanessa Gebbie and Marine by Alan Jenkins and John Kinsella. It’s thanks to the…
It gives me great pleasure to welcome Lucinda Neall to the blog today. Lucinda is the daughter of Michael MccGwire who was a midshipman in 1942 and served on the H.M.S Rodney during Operation Pedestal. He later went on to have a distinguished career as an academic after serving in the Royal Navy. Lucinda is a…
The Poetry School has been given permission by the Imperial War Museum for a public screening of the Battle of the Somme film at the Cinema Museum, London on Saturday 4th February 2017. A group of ten poets, including myself, guided by Simon Barraclough and Julia Bird, have been working on poems written in response to…
Today I’ve gone back to Choman Hardi’s Considering the Women.An important book with a central sequence of poems about the Anfal genocide of the Kurds in 1988 in which over a hundred thousand people were killed. I have heard her read twice at Aldebugh and in London at the Poet’s quest for peace. There are two…