Welcome to my poetry website. Here you’ll find some of my poems and other writing, plus details of where you can see my work in books and journals, and on websites, as well as upcoming readings.
A short biography…
My first collection of poetry, Scarecrow, was published in 2017. I’m also a co-founder of independent publisher Dunlin Press, and an organiser at Poetry Wivenhoe, in Essex, where I live. I also like to take photographs.
‘Stories won’t fuel me. Feed me blank pages and I’ll score them like Hendrix. Have you seen my chickens? My chickens are in the forgeworks Popping their claws like corn.’ Chris McCabe, from ‘Campfire’, in The Triumph of Cancer, Penned in the Margins, 2018 or ‘this is not to say she’s like a fish she …
For the past year, between writing poetry, I’ve been busy with another project – and it’s launching this week. The Orphaned Spaces is a rumination on life and loss through the prism of liminal spaces – derelict land, brownfield sites, edgelands – caught between moments of dilapidation and regeneration. I’ve provided the words and a few photos …
What I admire in some poets is that they know what they want from their writing. They produce work to the same high standard, sure of the form the poems will take and precise in their vocabulary every time. They seem to be able to do this at will. And this means you can throw …
Recent poems have featured in Envoi (upcoming), The Stinging Fly, London Grip, The Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Coast to Coast to Coast and The Interpreter’s House. I was also recently highly commended in Words By the Water’s 2018 competition. My first collection of poetry, Scarecrow, was published in 2017.
2018
‘Temple for Mithras’ and ‘Calypso’ in the anthology Tempest, Patrician Press, 2018 (upcoming, Winter 2018)
‘What Makes It Real’, in Envoi (upcoming, Winter 2018)
Reading: Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, a Magma and Coast to Coast to Coast event with Rebecca Gethin, Polly Atkin and James Goodman, 4 November.
Reading: University of Essex, Literature, Film and Theatre studies Department, 2 October
‘There are No Mountains’, displayed at Marsden Walking Weekend / Poetry and Place event.
The Orphaned Spaces, Dunlin Press, 2018
Compere: Poetrywivenhoe, Ekphrasis project with Mosaic Stanza group, Colchester, 29 June
Reading: New Town, Colchester, community day opened by John Cooper Clarke
‘Caution Please’, in The Stinging Fly (Issue 38, Volume 2, Summer 2018)
‘A Viewfinder’, in The Poetry Village (May 2018)
Reading: Poetrywivenhoe, with guest poet Rebecca Watts, Wivenhoe, Essex, 26 April
Reading: Crossing Borders II, with Poetrywivenhoe, Suffolk Poetry Society (hosts), University of Suffolk, Ipswich, 25 April
Compere: Poetrywivenhoe, with guest poet John Greening, 22 March
‘Request Stop’, highly commended, Ways With Words, Words By the Water poetry competition 2018
‘Unsaid’, in London Grip, February 2018
Chair: Writing the Place, with Syd Moore (noveslist), Robin Brooks (radio dramatist) and Nicola Werenowska (playwright), Essex Book Festival, FirstSite, Colchester, 4 March
Reading: launch of Towards the Light: Poems of Reconciliation, Essex Book Festival, The Minories, Colchester, 3 March
‘Tomorrow’s Flowers’ and ‘Les Fleurs de Demain) (trs) in Towards the Light: Poems of Reconciliation, ed. Vivien Whelpton, Kapaju Books, March 2018
‘An Anniversary’, in The Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Issue: January-March 2018
Compere: Poetrywivenhoe, with guest poet Kit Wright, 25 January
2017
Reading: launch of Coast to Coast to Coast, Issue 2, at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, 19 December
‘Ways’ in Coast to Coast to Coast, Issue 2, eds. Maria Isakova Bennett and Michael Brown
Reading: at The Great Big Poetry Open Mic, with David Canning, Essex Poetry Festival, 11 October
Speaking/host: launch of Priced Out, by Tinsel Edwards, Atom Gallery, London, 3 August
Editor: Priced Out, by Tinsel Edwards, Dunlin Press
Reading: Poetrywivenhoe, 25 May
Interviewed: ‘Poems Wirth Crowing About’, in Colchester Gazette, 14 April
Reading: Poetry Aloud, Bury St Edmunds, 28 March
Reading: Crossing Borders, with Poetrywivenhoe, Suffolk Poetry Society (hosts), University of Suffolk, Ipswich, 21 March
Reading: launch of Scarecrow, Wivenhoe Bookshop, Wivenhoe, 17 March
Scarecrow, debut collection, Dunlin Press, March
‘Day Lilies’ in The Interpreter’s House, Issue 64, February
Towards the Light: Poems of Reconciliation
The Sentinel Literary Quarterly
The Interpreter’s House: Issue 64
Est: Collected Reports from East Anglia
From the City to the Saltings: Poems from Essex
This is a place for some poems already published and others that are not published elsewhere. For other poems – and writing – see the Publications page.
On this line lies the unanswered question
of our returns. Being there and also here,
and never quite so between. Like a fish snaps at
another’s tail, twins look into each other’s eyes,
for what? A pause in the reddening of a leaf,
the deep-etched rough of bark, scratching
at something that might be really here.
Our human endeavours, earnest and meek:
like nostalgia for a branch line, for diesel trains,
the bricks of old stations blackened but firm,
the coal-faced timbre of local voices.
From a clarty carriage window, the mountains
never rising, just there, ever,
a horizon, clouds
stroking across their contours. Request stop.
Shops boarded up, the kinds of faces you once
might have known now gone. Aye and the
people you once would meet. That mist-mizzle
embrace along those last miles of shore
and the cormorants combing out their wings
on this shallow edge of land. And the little
dunlins lifting across a lace hem of tide.
A plastic wrapper crinkling and slippery under
my boot. Rucksack laden with yesterday’s
ideas. Wondering what words might be best,
soon, when we see each other again,
and then how the birds got there, if I’d missed
them before, if they were really here last
time, if they will send me off tomorrow
‘Request Stop’ was highly commended in Ways With Words ‘Words By the Water’ poetry competition, 2018
What I meant in my last poem
was that I knew it would be cold as I waited for the train
and that I was expecting to shiver. I mean
so many things so unevenly,
and my pacing never quells them, and my fingers
search for pockets which, in a not-
quite-warm-enough coat, are all
sewn up. It is autumn, you see, and the sky
is crossed with black ribbons and there is a nervousness
at the corner where tied-up dogs turn
circles by the shop and every hour is vital.
The filament trees begin to glow
and it feels more important that we lock our doors
and take all the calls now in case we become
distracted or if the wind picks up and a signal
is lost. And so what I meant to say is that
it’s okay if you’re not here for the bonfire because I’m
not fond of them either. But just know that there is one
should you want. Something smouldering, licking
into light, or dark, or some other other.
First published by London Grip, 2018
After the young sun’s
riot flares are gone
come the spare ghost grounds
of a late summer:
the parchment-thin skies
with barely a breath;
a cross-hatch of reeds
brittle as old bone
Something slips away.
I watched it wither.
Was I old, sleeping,
as it came and passed?
I was in the fold,
staked into the soil,
flapping at the wind
with the gulls and crows
Mouthless, eyeless face.
Torn gloves and dried dirt.
Sapless limbs flailing
in a hessian shirt
I served no purpose.
The bats and the moths
can have their time now.
I am bleached and frayed
Soon you will find me
dumped in the hedgerow,
rotten frame flayed with
galium’s cleavers
First published in Scarecrow, Dunlin Press, 2017
They eat Korean
on a cut-through from the Strand
sweat in sad cagoules
plot routes through rickshaws
stop for human statues
and picture themselves
while our own eyes haze
for homesome time
/
the air vents still hum
behind a collage of hotels
and the smoking pissed bodies
dance higgledy across kerbs
for the clasphanded men
by the crumbled theatre steps
and the happy-kissing 2-4-1ers
in the hours of loosening hair
/
those hours of delays
and delayed returns
lost watching tarmac
and time and river pass
down by the out-blacked Crittall
and creaking service lifts
on an arcade way to somewhere
beyond the wilting promenades
/
and did you hear the traffic cone
trumpet concertos?
and the woman who sees
Jesus in a dead baby?
and tells the world always
that we turned away?
that we always turn away? which
after careful thought
on the tramp back under ground
you realise bibimbap
we always do
we always do
First published in Scarecrow, Dunlin Press, 2017
If one of us was gone
and plucked almost silently
and lost amongst the gulls
long crowned white for winter
If they slid above the blackened fields
to lift your raincoat and fedora
like an old plume of a cigarette
rising trembling for a dawn
And if autumn was an alternating stance
and your cedar and nylon
just left us as leaves clinging
in a rosewood November blaze
And if your voice became a slow drum rumble
and outside your mountain room
by the sagging lengthening briars
aphids still gathered at the buds
Unpublished
