Ictus

  The recent furore around Kate Clanchy's Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me ( Picador, 2019 )  brings up some pressing question...

At long last I am conforming to that classic format for the informative blog-post, the listicle of numbered items on a shared theme, even as...

   If poetry is built on paradox, perhaps one reason poetry seems to have thrived under lockdown is the paradoxical nature of so much in our...

    Sent to me by a friend who discovered it in Brunswick Square, Hove. It's mentioned, in fact, on Lee Harwood's Wikipedia entry.  ...

Free Humans by Hen Ogledd   A song from one of my favourite albums of the year (" an ambitious, progressive, intelligent and...

RETSINA If there was, running in its sweet bitter scent, A thread of breeze playing the glint of sea’s glass, Glare off walls needling tears...

   Hearing the news of Derek Mahon's passing a few weeks ago, I drew out his Collected Poems from an obscure bookshelf in the summer hou...

 In a post from earlier this year I mentioned that its been ten years this summer since I began this blog; sporadically enough at times and ...

 The striped caterpillar my daughter found in the garden and kept in a jam-jar has now entered the pupa stage and formed a cocoon among the ...

 After seven weeks now of this strange interiorised life, I continue to be poised between thinking these home-bound spring days could well b...