Reflection

I have been working for several weeks on my second book of poetry, ‘Reflection’, which went to the printer last week. I collect it on November 8th. Below is the cover, from a photograph that I took on Dunwich beach on the evening of the longest day.  

Listen?

  This is a sad twist on an old tale  — a carol for our present circumstances. Why won’t Wise Men deliver their gifts? They have displayed the glittering promise from the backs of their awkward  mounts, circling  endlessly in the  featureless  waste. Shepherds cannot point the way, they search …

White-out

Snow is threatened for us again this afternoon, so here is another Tanka to welcome it:     Each flake steals colour silent theft’s benign softness a camouflaged coup that covers all in fragile crystal immobility.  

Who Am I Today?

If you have not yet reached the need for the  morning ritual described in this poem, know that you have it to look forward to.   Is it the aging husband with enlarged prostate? The asbestos handler with pleural plaque? The retired runner with calcified  cartilage and  the mysterious cyst, …

The Last Word

By way of a change, here is a short piece of prose: In a writers’ group this morning we were challenged to write a short story in 150 words.  The story below contains exactly that number.   The light was starting to fade, and breaking soft waves seemed even quieter.  …

Moving Hands

How many things that  seemed eternal early in life, have completely vanished?                       Sometime in the nineteen-fifties it perched on the hundred-foot workshop,  where Waitrose’s  entrance is now. It would pace the working lives of hundreds. First as boys, learning to master metal …

Irony

During a few days in Liverpool we visited Crosby Beach, to see the Antony Gormley sculptures arranged as  ‘Another Place’.  Two friends had been examining the work, and turned to walk off the beach.  I took the photograph below, and the poem was written after I examined the image, using an …

Deleting Footnotes

This poem recently was selected by Helen Ivory for appearance in the poetry webzine  ‘Ink, Sweat and Tears‘, it also appeared the the Suffolk Poetry Society’s magazine ‘Twelve Rivers’.     PLEASE CLICK ON THE ARROW BUTTON ABOVE TO HEAR THIS POEM   You can never prepare for this task. It …

Entrance

    PLEASE CLICK ON THE ARROW BUTTON ABOVE TO HEAR THIS POEM   He glides the Hog to the sidewalk, blips the throttle then kills the big twin cam but not cleanly, the rig shakes twice with pre-ignition. Shit!  –  He hates when that happens, it spoils an entrance. …

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