To compose this poem I simply took the titles of James Brown’s hits of the 1950s, 1960s, and rearranged them so that they basically spell out a kind of speech of a fellow, of course, probably – well, yes, it…

Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour, uncountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples – I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante, “a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls…”…

  Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its…

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…

This is the burning-pot, last time the rice. Tonight, it’s the specially-bought organic potatoes. So, time to sit back and ponder why it’s gone wrong. You never were a ball-player, a Sobers, a Beckham. Even juggling with Latin embarrassed you…

Gunn: It’s a dramatic monologue, and it’s not spoken by myself – it’s spoken by one of Odysseus’s sailors in a time of – well you might say of enormous stress because he’s just been transformed into some animal –…

  In the city, under the saw-toothed leaves of an oak overlooking the tracks, he sits out the last minutes before dawn, lucky to sleep third shift. Years before he was anything, he lay on so many kinds of grass,…

  The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, It is as if,…

Broke to every known mischance, lifted over all By the light sane joy of life, the buckler of the Gaul; Furious in luxury, merciless in toil, Terrible with strength renewed from her tireless soil; Strictest judge of her own soul,…

  On Sunday the hawk fell on Bigging And a chicken screamed Lost in its own little snowstorm. And on Monday he fell on the moor And the Field Club Raised a hundred silent prisms. And on Tuesday he fell…

This poem is called Atlas and I want you to think of Atlas in the classic pose of holding up the world.   Extreme exertion isolates a person from help, discovered Atlas. Once a certain shoulder-to-burden ratio collapses, there is…

Coming out with your clutch of postcards in a Tate Gallery bag and another clutch of images packed into your head you pause on the steps to look across the river and there’s a new one: light bright buildings, a…

  I didn’t die that hot August night. I faked it, stuffed a barrage balloon into a jump suit. Left it slumped on the bathroom floor. Hitched a ride on a rig rolling to New York. Climbed into the rig,…

Circumstances analogous to life and death, house cleaning or clutter. Dante or an old shirt. It’s there to cut, but not to chop. Between the knuckle-bones it’s soft as butter. Or you picked a leaf off the road. What is…

  A poem set in Dublin, St Stephen’s Green those huge black canvases in Newman’s church, St Stephen’s Green — restoration botched perhaps — Raphael Cartoons, copies, loved by Newman, quite gone out. Something about, outside, Joyce’s head, too silver…

It is 5 am, and I am standing in the half light bedroom holding our son. He is finally asleep and I lay him gently in the cot, trying not to rattle the toy bear attached to the bars. Next…

  the green of days : the chimneys alone : the green of days and the women the whistle : the green of days and the women the whistle of me entering the poem through the chimneys plural : I…