Interviewer: I was going to mention just that poem – this was obviously a poem where you were excited, it comes with a kind of authority and I would have said that it took a lot of trouble to live…

Every now and then one writes a poem which seems in some way significant to one's own development as a poet. 'Song of the Battery Hen' is, for me, such a poem. It seems to combine the taut, claustrophobic atmosphere…

  Farne cormorants with catches in their beaks shower fishscale confetti on the shining sea. The first bright weather here for many weeks for my Sunday G-Day train bound for Dundee, off to St Andrew’s to record a reading, doubtful,…

I live in Marin County, just above San Francisco in the hills. And I often run and bicycle in the hills. And one year, there had been a great deal of flooding and erm, big trees came down. And this…

  We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves, our sense of being Poets from America, we went from Rome to Fano, met the mayor, posed for the photographers and served on…

  A new volcano has erupted, the papers say, and last week I was reading where some ship saw an island being born: at first a breath of steam, ten miles away; and then a black fleck, basalt, probably –…

  The spring has darkened with activity. The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree: Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape, Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape. These will advance in their due series, space The season like…

  Turning the pages of the book you have lent me of your wounded city, reading the Braille of its walls, walking beneath ghost branches of chestnuts, fires that turn the bullet-shattered windows bronze, flaring an instant without warming the…

  With an epigraph from a Pears’ Soap advert from 1899: The first step towards lightening THE WHITE MAN’s burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. A right savage I was – sozzled to the nose with sprightly Muldoon,…

  On the day of the cancellation The librarian phoned at two. My reading at Swillingcote Youth Club Had regrettably fallen through. The members of Swillingcote Youth Club Had just done their GCSEs And demanded a rave, not poems, Before…

‘Opinion is not worth a rush’ – W. B. Yeats Who cares what the poets think? Shelley said they were ‘unacknowledged legislators’. He made paper boats of his thoughts and set them sailing on the Thames at Marlow – much…

Midwinter. The sun red on the brink of the tree far side Of the valley. We sit, she and I, in the frozen wide-eyed Silence, watch the living come-and-go of our breath. Nothing’s permanent. Nothing can last except, now. A…

  (Allen Curnow 1911-2001) Grief – or if what’s expected and accepted cannot be grief, then call it incomprehension – has kept me from the company of the Muse and the sweet children she bears me, Rodicus, because my brother…

  I cannot give you words which turned as succulent as flesh upon the nib: thin men write gaunt poems and each word sticks out like a rib

  for Moshe Liba after reading his ‘Holocaust’ poems [‘The aims of life are the best defence against death.’ Primo Levi] To grow up in the shadow of sorrow blue ancestral grief a curtain of grey moved by a passing…

  i You are the generosity of wings, opened into the recent sun, the inner ear of heat-weltered corrugated iron, a vast that yawns through the flower’s nuclear mouth. Your five moods, unspoken, remember on someone else’s lips wheels of…

It has asked to be treated like all the other days. Not to be beamed at in assembly, winked at, singled out for praise, parted for or crowded round, not to be starred or handed a badge or in obvious…