Winner of the 2021 Saboteur Award in the best poetry pamphlet category – The Weight of Snow – published by Maytree Press at the end of February 2021 acknowledges a history of grief in my own family that started when my mother’s sister, Joan, was killed by a lorry at the age of 10. This 1950s childhood Continue reading

The wonderful American poet, Frank Bidart will be 80 on 27 May 2019 and his Collected Poems – Half-light – published in 2017 and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize should be read by anyone interested in contemporary poetry.      Half-light – the title of the Collected Poems (2017) – is a quintessentially Bidartian title, suggesting as Continue reading

a poem for the IWD ‘Be Bold For Change’ Conference, Life Rooms Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust – International Women’s Day 2017   Victoria Wood, Emily Bronte, Bernadette Devlin – we praise you Emmeline Pankhurst, Marlene Dietrich, Andrea Dworkin – we praise you   Margaret Clitheroe, Mary Peters, Rosalind Franklin – we praise you Jodie Continue reading

It’s a long time since I fell in love with a writer.  I mean the real thing.  Having to get every book and read and read , then read the biographical stuff alongside the work.  I did it with Hermann Hesse and Francoise Sagan when I was 15, and D.H.Lawrence (don’t tell anyone…), Wallace Stevens, Continue reading