As soon as we had died, we decided to walk home. A white tatterflag marked where each journey began. It was a slow business – so much water to be crossed, so many dirt roads followed. We walked together, but…

Imagine you are driving nowhere, with no one beside you, with the empty road unravelling and ravelling in sympathy as the wheel turns in your hands.   On either side the wheatfields go shimmering past in an absence of birdsong,…

(the can opener was invented forty-eight years after the tin can) When you asked me for a love poem, (another love poem) my thoughts were immediately drawn to the early days of the food canning industry – all those strangely…

I love you as I love the Hatchetfish, the Allmouth, the Angler, the Sawbelly and Wolf-eel, the Stoplight Loosejaw, the Fangtooth; all our sweet bathypelagic ones, and especially those too terrible or sly even for Latin names; who staple their…

Just for a quarter of the day, I’d have you follow me through the smoking willow herb and my father’s garden’s half-seized gate, down to that place where the knowledge of almost every- thing comes undone in the powdery ceanothus…

i.m. Mike and Barbara Heasman   Let is now give thanks for these salt-blown   wind-burned pastures where outgrass and timothy shrink from the harrow of the sea   where Scotland at long last wearies of muttering its own name…

This is my formula for the fall of things: we come to a river we always knew we’d have to cross. It ferries the twilight down through fieldworks   of corn and half-blown sunflowers. The only sounds, one lost cicada…