Poetry
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My reading for The Island Review
With my brand new, and attractively-priced Blue Snowball Ice microphone I recorded a reading for The Island Review, with their hashtag #islandreadings. If you’ve not visited their site you should do. It harbours all kinds of good things there. The Remembering Cliffs is an old poem, in fact one I wrote in my twenties, eventually collected in A Guernsey Double (2010)…
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Exploring Janet Sutherland’s poetry
There are perhaps only a couple-of-dozen poets I find myself returning to time and again. In the last year, however, Janet Sutherland has become one of them. I own her four collections from Shearsman Books, which are, in order of publication, Burning the Heartwood, Hangman’s Acre, Bone Monkey, and Home Farm. Each of these books contains an embarrassment of…
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The Dream Home
Very happy to have a new dark tale in the Autumn 2019 94th edition of the literary magazine The Frogmore Papers, edited by Jeremy Page. There are two other stories in this edition: A Citadel by Natalya Lowndes, and A Few Brief Words by Andrew Blair. I found both had a lovely balance of humour…
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Home thoughts from abroad
So at last found a bit of time to update this blog, as you can see from the photo, taken by my brother, of me tapping away on a terrace in Sicily. I am here taking a break with family. I love Sicily, and the terrace is quick with lizards, and has geckos crawling about…
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An Outbreak of Peace
An Outbreak of Peace, Stories and Poems in Response to the End of WWI Edited by Cherry Potts of Arachne Press, this great new anthology coincides with the centenary of the 1918 Armistice. The Launch Party, will be held: 7.00 pm, Wednesday 14th November 2018 — at Housmans, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX. If you’d like…
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Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, and grappling with what’s difficult
When I meet a difficult text, it invariably makes me think of the Genesis story of Jacob and the Angel, or at least its depictions in art. I like Jacob Epstein’s statue Jacob and the Angel (1940) in the Tate, but it is Gauguin’s Vision after the Sermon (1888) with women having just left church on…
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Antony Mair launches ‘Bestiary, and Other Animals’ at the Poetry Cafe
To The Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden last night, where Antony Mair launched his first full collection, Bestiary, and Other Animals, published by Live Canon. The Poetry Cafe was more crowded than I have ever seen it. Introduced by Helen Eastman, director of Live Canon, the reading was in two halves, reflecting the two sections…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 