Self-Portrait as Eve
I never use a peeler. I prefer the sweet frisson of a paring knife chasing my thumb around an…
There has to be an Afterlife
There has to be an afterlife, since matter Can neither be created or destroyed. So, fear not, you’ll continue.…
Return to Work
You: perched in an ivory pulpit, a shrew in wire-rimmed glasses. Me: bound to an office chair, a spaniel…
A Study in Blackness
The Royal Opera, London, Spring/Summer 2017 Giuseppe Verdi, Otello, Giuseppe Verdi, Don Carlo (1886 version), Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger…
The Cathedral of Soissons
Amiens, Rouen, Riems, Bourges, Chartres… the celebrated colossi of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture in France, those peaks rising from the…
Tiger Head Sonnets
XVIII My grandfather searches for flints, for bulb fractures, for shatter marks. A kestrel is rising like smoke over tumuli.…
T.S. Eliot, 1922 and transatlantic culture
In his recent book, Constellation of Genius – 1922: Modernism and All That Jazz, Kevin Jackson describes the indelible…
It’s All In The Paint
Wayne Thiebaud, White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London, 24 May – 2 July 2017 Prunella Clough, Annely Juda, London, 24…
Heathcote Williams: A Tribute
Along with Tom Stoppard, Heathcote Williams is for me the great English writer of my generation. He is first…
Seeing Robert Lowell Plain
In the centenary of his birth the major American poet Robert Lowell is back in focus, if not quite…
Serious Play
Say Something Back, Denise Riley, Picador, May 2016, pp. 96, £9.99 (Paperback) Commotion of the Birds, John Ashberry, Carcanet,…
Interview | Karen Ashton, founder of the Vauxhall Art Car Boot Sale
This Sunday, the Art Car Boot Fair Pulls Back In To Vauxhall Back to its roots in the heart…
To the Man
I was a songbird, one of the kind whose name I do not know, plain of plumage but with…
Basra 1958
Three of them boarded the bus rifles pointed aggressively bayonets fixed and furious glinting brightly in the stippled morning…
I Have Called You By Your Name
I. Hvalfjörður I’d promised Sam whales, a substitute for his Mum who was off on holiday with her new…
In Search of Freedom
I was in a taxi searching for her house, but was anxious; would she meet me, tell me her…
Mitad del Mundo
The poem is in the form of a letter sent from Ecuador to a loved one, far away. Mitad…
Cultural Readings of the Refugee Crisis
In jeans and a t-shirt, demurely slouching at the end of a table of prominent and impassioned speakers, Hassan…
Godhuli (Cowdust)
Beyond the bend there were buffaloes, Cows and a single boy perched, Half-naked, on the back of a buffalo.…
Rain When it Falls on Bracken by Fiona Sampson
Rain when it falls on bracken silkily is like a sea of sounds and you are deep among them…
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