Blog posts in February 2025

I’ve just added 40 per cent to my lifetime output of long Poem, and this blog is an excited celebration. These three new Poems include my strongest political writing to date – Where Power Lies, an unpatriotic swipe at Britain’s warfaring record, and The Commodity News, which pours venom on government and business greed at the heart of the global environment calamity. Continue reading →

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 (This is a reworking and updating of a blog first published in 2022)
The madness started at the high point of Western civilisation, about the time of Woodstock and the Summer of Love when we all of us thought we could change the world. Few people were reading poetry, and it seems to have been side-lined to university English departments where it survived in a kind of National Trust for the writing-we-no longer-have-a-use-for: the old, the obscure, the academic, the elite. I wanted it to be more like The Novel – bigger. Continue reading →

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It flatters his colossal ego and frightens his opponents I would like to offer a mildly unconventional suggestion that we should stop paying attention to what President Donald Trump says. What he does, his disruption to justice and liberal values, … Continue reading →

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