Poetry

You can read the poetry on screen or download PDFs if that’s easier. Some of my stand-alone shorter poems are also included in the selection. Here’s what’s on offer: 

The Commodity News

A girl provokes an angry conversation among passengers in a train carriage. Through their voices The Commodity News presents an intolerant view not only of the coming climate catastrophe, but also of the greed and explotation which has brought us here. It’s an appropriately manic exercise in alliteration and rhyme. Just get into the rhythm and go with the flow.

Where Power LIes – Last Orders

If you’re proud of Britain’s vicious military history, or just fascinated by powerful people doing nasty things to weak people everywhere, you should steer clear of this one. From Agincourt and Waterloo to the Irish Troubles, the miners’ strike and the Iraq War, this poem puts an uncompromising combat boot in. If the state does all this in our name, aren’t we better off stateless?

The Reinvention of Time Travel

Time machines are never going to do it. Genealogy charts can’t be the answer. But what if you track back through your life in space and time to encounter those who died while you were still alive and meet those who were old when they were born? The narrator’s explorations lead to the preposterous suggestion that this really could enable peole to travel in time. He sounds a lot like me, but don’t be deceived – I don’t have a cat.

What Makes Life Last

What’s so amusing about death? What Makes Life Last is a lighthearted romp along the shoreline between the waste and futility of life and its inevitable final outcome. The narrator is on a quest to find anything that will make life last. Or perhaps something which will make sense of death. The poem takes in social attitudes to celebrity culture, religion, grief, and personal loss. The resolution is heartfelt and unexpectedly positive. No, really it is.

Dark Matter – Dark Energy 

Dark Matter – Dark Energy benefits from being the shortest of my long poems, and providing 49 different versions of the truth. Written before the term “post truth” was coined, it postulates the trial at the end of time of those whose alleged deceptions have left their mark on humanity. So read on to learn who’s responsible, but please don’t be too shocked if you find out.

Mountain

The poet comes to live beneath a Welsh mountain which provides a real location and a symbolic backdrop for musings on love, marriage, age, and the changing seasons. It’s a large work which contains many of my best self-contained shorter poems while also wrestling with aspirations for a coherent philosophy which is compatible with the realities of life.

Weekend

Weekend is cycle of poems conceived in heady days of undergraduate life in the late Sixties. The poet wakes one Sunday morning with the distinct impression that the world will end by the next weekend. He works his way through an urban wasteland for the next seven days, exploring whatever experiences, relationships and jokes that come his way, believing they all may be his last. It includes The Burial of Heroes, reckoned to be among my most successful stand-alone poems.

Shorter poems

Poems of Botany and Revolution 

A casual selection of simple verse reflecting my fondness for our native flora.

Selected short poems 

This is just a few of my shorter poems spanning 50 years of very low output writing and listed from the oldest to the most recent. Others can be found embedded in the long poems listed above.