Ictus

                                                       A confluence in my reading - Jonathan Coe's biography Like a Fiery Elephant ...

  MHB in happier days    A little late for resolutions maybe but one of mine this year is to buy more books. Let me qualify this, altho...

  In one pixelated news-image of the aftermath of the recent Paris shootings, Bataclan concert-hall is shown as a charnel-house of bloody...

  If we agree that both phonetic immediacy and formal cohesion are both key elements of the poem in how it strikes the listener when read al...

A Review of Stephen Romer: YELLOW STUDIO (Carcanet, 2008)    In a Radio 3 interview with Clive Wilmer conducted 20 years ago, Stephen ...

   Like many people, I don't find much time to read these days. I could bemoan the skittering atomistic banality-fest of post-historic c...

  Here's something for Carnival weekend. This has been the tune of the summer in my car, at least when my teenage son's on board. ...

                    Untitled Nude,  Tom Phillips 2015                                                               Men of War , Nicola...

      Fernando Pessoa has always been one of my favourite poets. His theory of heteronyms - the concept that a writer could hive off dif...

"But to poetry — you have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about n...