Poetry
-
Versatile, unflinching and soulful. Richard Fleming’s tour de force
Stone Witness by Richard Fleming, published by Blue Ormer Publishing Richard Fleming’s new collection is a tour de force, harvesting poems which include some of his strongest work to date. The best of Richard Fleming’s work is possessed by soul; that unmistakable sense that the poem you are reading is inhabited by something other than…
-
Is this the year of The Shakespeare Heptet?
I love the The Shakespeare Heptet. I have previously called them the greatest unknown band in the UK. So I was pleased to catch them in one of their Brighton Fringe performances at St Mary The Virgin in Kemptown on Saturday 13th May. The Heptet is designed to have a revolving cast. But on Saturday 13th May,…
-
Is John Keats a natural poet?
‘If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.’ John Keats, Hampstead Feb 27th 1818, Letter to John Taylor. Keats wrote this ‘axiom’ in a letter to his friend John Taylor when he was 22. Are we to read this as a notion of genius — that great…
-
Is your writing true to yourself?
Reading A Man in Love, volume two of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, I’m struck by how his fidelity to describing life’s minutiae lends credibility to his descriptions of more important things. If he can be so reliable in his description of doing the washing up, then we instinctively trust his truth telling about more important events. Knausgaard’s candour is magnificent. He…
-
Guernsey is my Touchstone
Hideously busy lately but there’s always time for a quick toot on the self promotion trumpet. Another one of my endless love letters to Guernsey cropped up in the ever-interesting The Frogmore Papers last week. I am very grateful to its editor Jeremy Page. Other love letters to the island were collected in A Guernsey Double a…
-
A mixed bag
I have been working hard on my children’s story The Second Kind of Darkness in the last two months. The end is in sight. Putting the story aside for a few years has really helped. Time is a great editor. I’ve also been filling in gaps in my reading of good children’s books, including Noughts & Crosses…
-
The Basil O’Flaherty
I’m enjoying the intriguingly-named U.S. literary arts website, The Basil O’Flaherty. It is edited by J.K. Shawhan, and I am grateful to her for publishing four of my short poems here.
-
Yeats’s Tower and Coole Park
So having carried Yeats’s words about in my head for 40 years, it was amazing to finally get to look at Thoor Ballylee, a one time home of the poet, and a place which had an enormously powerful symbolic presence in his mind and his poetry. I went there with Lorraine, my wife, and our…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 