All Blogposts

  • Featured at Poetry Wales and Proletarian Poetry

    Featured at Poetry Wales and Proletarian Poetry

    Peter Raynard at Proletarian Poetry has written about my poem Working Class Poem, first published in Under the Radar magazine.  I wrote the poem when I was thinking about my own background and about the ways that working class people are represented in the mainstream media and in popular culture in the UK.  Mostly, I feel… Read more

  • Instagram Poetry

    Instagram Poetry

    This work I’ve allowed myself to be distracted by a competition running on Instagram and it’s been  huge fun.  The Poetry School and Soda Pictures have teamed up to run a competition to mark the release of A Quiet Passion – a new biopic of Emily Dickinson (in cinemas 7 April).  You can read all… Read more

  • Mostly waiting

    Mostly waiting

    There have been a lot of lovely things going on in the UK poetry world recently, including festivals in Birmingham and in Scotland, and a writing retreat in Cornwall, and they’ve all gone on without me, although I’ve enjoyed reading about them and seeing pictures on social media.  I would have gone to all of… Read more

  • ‘Ten Poems from Ireland’ (Candlestick Press)

    ‘Ten Poems from Ireland’ (Candlestick Press)

    Town Hall Poets are a Poetry Society Stanza group who meet regularly at Trowbridge Town Hall, and other places, to read and talk about poetry, workshop each other’s poems and arrange open-mic nights.  We’re also lucky enough to be the Trowbridge Chapter of the Candlestick Press Collective, which means that we receive complimentary copies of… Read more

  • A quick update

    A quick update

    A quick update about what I’m up to.  I’m still waiting to hear about a few submissions and I’ve sent out several poems to competitions.  In recent years I’ve been trying to focus on magazines rather than competitions but I decided to ring the changes a bit and see how I get on.  In the next… Read more

  • A visit to The Poetry Business in Sheffield

    A visit to The Poetry Business in Sheffield

    …and other thoughts about being away from home. I’m just back from three nights away in Sheffield where I met up with all but one of my Aldeburgh Eight friends.  We’ve been trying to meet up again for some time and we managed to arrange to converge in Sheffield for one of the famous Writing Days… Read more