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Poetry, bikes, dementia care...
Poetry, bikes, dementia care...
What is poetic voice? Is it synonymous with style? Or something else? Perhaps the poet’s “take” on the world? Pele Cox and Rich Uridge seek answers from a range of greats including Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay and Vernon Watkins who, with a drunken Dylan Thomas,…
Pele Cox and I ask: what is the purpose of poetry? With the help of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Thomas Wyatt, we conclude that, in part, poetry’s job is to move readers to virtuous action or “well doing and not well…
A walking stick, a deadly arc Your face unstitched and come apart. The dying light’s the deepest dark It casts a shadow, leaves a mark. A finger painting just in red A rainbow arched beside your bed. No treasured end, a chest of blood All…
The poet Pele Cox and I discuss the differences between poetry (her world) and journalism (mine). With the help of Ted Hughes and his Birthday Letters we talk about how poetry can tackle shocking subject matter in a way that prose alone cannot. I talk…
Delighted to announce that I’m co-hosting a series of talks on poetry with the poet Pele Cox. I’ll make sure I post each episode here as we record it. Or you can check out the programme website or sign up through your usual podcast provider.…
Like many journalists of my generation I’ve had a fascination with the work of the press photographer Don McCullin for my whole career. Each of his images manages to tell a story that us writers would struggle to convey in a thousand words. So I…
There is no pastRememberedOr futureImagined.Just the present.Tense.A singularity.You live in the moment. Very on point as they say.Content (or so I hope) sucking tea from a sippy cupOr shredding tissues in your lapWhile I am walking an imaginary dog (the one I was convinced would…
Though August’s barely halfway throughThe copse is clad in autumn’s hueIts summer greens now fading fastAnd taking on a rusty cast. Embroidered by the evening sunThe trees from threads of gold were spunBut in the furnace split and crackenAnd dieback tips of ash twigs blacken.Limp…
Scene one: a cubicle in A & E For what is deathIf not escapeFrom pain in this worldAnd promise in the next? The words sermon-like. Disembodied. A narrator.A bed of music. Pings and beeps. The baseline drone of a ventilator. The curtains close to end…
Five years ago it felt like the world had momentarily stopped spinning. The nightly Covid bulletins aside, everything seemed preternaturally silent. Planes stayed on the ground. Traffic halted. And without the usual din of everday life (and later the weekly clap for carers) we began…
Federico García Lorca was one of Spain’s finest poets. Assassinated by Fascists in August 1936 soon after the start of the Spanish Civil War his death should remind us of the dangers of fascism as it rises once again, not just in Spain where I’m…
Midnight strikes on the memorial clockA flame throwing dragon is guarding the flockWhile a gunpowder fog glistens and glosses The uniform slates and the uniform mosses. For God and for Country. Lest we forget. A window on North Street turned aquarium greenWhere a Six Nations turf war bled…