The child woke to a cry, not his. It came from beyond: a cry of the absolute night. But it wasn’t a ghost. It wasn’t a beast. It wasn’t a truck or a train. It was a closer cry, of…

I am seated comfortably just where the ocean And the river collide in a high and wide Commotion and where a large contingent Of bedraggled coathanger cormorants has gathered Looking and sounding a bit like The Rolling Stones Belting out…

V.   Welsh was the mother tongue, English was his. He taught her the body by fetishist quiz, father and daughter on the bottom stair; ‘Dy benelin yw elbow, dy wallt di yw hair,   chin yw dy en di,…

For years you kept your accent in a box beneath the bed, the lock rusted shut by hours of elocution how now brown cow the teacher’s ruler across your legs. We heard it escape sometimes, a guttural uh on the…

When I was a child I worried that when I got my chance to love a beast I would not be up to the task. As he came in for the kiss I’d turn away or gag on the mane…

For the first killing we left you there alone my aunt and I. Took the children to a rural fair that celebrated farming’s age of steam. Thrashing machines, steam tractors. That sort of thing. The billy kid you stunned, or…

The prison sits unmistakably on the horizon. Regardless of poetry it remains a definitive interpretation of a prison. Watertight. A thing you can hold in your hand and believe in. A doorknob. A cork. Sorry not like a cork. That…

A floodlit Wembley. Lisa, the producer, swears into her walkie-talkie. We Edwardses, four generations, stand in line, between ramps: Smile for the cameras. My great grandparents twiddle their thumbs in wheelchairs, as Lisa tells us to relax, Mr Knievel has…

‘A great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that we respond positively to birdsong.’ – Scientific researcher quoted in The Daily Telegraph 8.2.2012 Centuries of English verse Suggest the selfsame thing: A negative response is rare When birds are heard to sing….

This is the tale of the woodsman’s daughter. Born with a box of ashes set beside the bed, in case. Before the baby’s first cry, he rolled her face into the cinders, held it. Weak from the bloom of too-much-blood,…

We should have taken better note of what crashed through the wall, what primal animal force, head ducked, what near-extinct species which can cross any river more than a mile wide from what to whatever; what force when drought-moulted, when…

In memoriam for my father-in-law, Phil Rouleau   My virgin shot from the first tee at the Royal Regina   took off straight for the spectators,   hit a tree,   bounced back   with a crack   like a…

  They call it the look of eagles, that gaze beyond the skies. You were marked from the start with your white star and the band just above your left hind hoof with three dots, one for each year on…

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…

  Having reached this stretch of unrecorded ground, this level stillness of relentless day, we’ve found we are alone. Those raising up their hands are branded by the sun, those falling on their knees in prayer are kept there. The…

Two Late Portraits 1. Audrey Wills I was a Brixham girl and Dad’s boat was the pride of the fleet every day when they came ashore    I had my pick of the mackerel    beautiful shiny blue suits  …