I'd normally run a mile from a 'family fun day', but last Saturday I set aside my prejudices and lent a hand at my community roof garden for their annual Chelsea Fringe event. I'm actually a keyholder for the garden now, and on the friendly-and-informal committee, but my gardening still hasn't progressed much beyond appreciating …
Author: Hilaire
I am a writer of poetry and prose. I was born and brought up in Melbourne but have lived in London most of my adult life.
devouring Barracuda
The book: Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas Start time: Thursday 14th May approximately 11 p.m. Finish time: Sunday 24th May approximately 8:45 a.m. Number of pages: 513 This is fast for me. I'd wanted to read this for a while but it looked like a chunky novel and not one I could easily carry around with …
Notes on the Poetry of B.S. Johnson
On Wednesday evening we attended a free event at the Poetry Library discussing and celebrating the poetry of B.S. Johnson, who is better known for his experimental novels such as The Unfortunates. I'd prepared for the event by reading the selection of Johnson's poetry published in Penguin Modern Poets 25 (1975) - an old secondhand …
eight week review
It's just over eight weeks since I quit my job and time is doing that weird thing it seems to do of speeding up and filling up the more 'free' time one has. So I thought it might be good to take a step back and reflect on what I've done in that period. I've …
off to the charity shop
I bid farewell to an old favourite the other day. A school satchel that has seen better days, and for the last few years, if not longer, has hung, not quite forgotten, on a hook on the back of the door that hides our hot water tank. I bought it decades ago, before satchels became …
Friday night and Saturday morning
On Friday night I was on the bill with Joolz Sparkes at Fourth Friday at the Poetry Café, reading a bunch of poems from our London Undercurrents project. There's more about the event on our dedicated LU blog here. I'd been looking forward to this and practising for quite a while, and, as the reading …
staying the course
I thought about calling this post 'I survived a poetry course'. But that would've been a tad melodramatic. I've just completed a six week poetry course on Monday evenings, based in the Marlene Dumas exhibition at Tate Modern and tutored by the amazing Pascale Petit. And I've surprised myself by really rather enjoying it. I …
underground reading
One of the few up sides of my enforced break from cycling was the extra reading time on the journey to and from work. I found poetry particularly suited to short bursts of reading, and also loved how individual poems could quickly plunge me into a completely different emotional and linguistic space to the squash …
not twiddling my thumbs
In my rebellious teenage years, if I expressed my desire to be a writer, the immediate 'helpful' suggestion was that I should pursue a career in journalism. I knew strongly this was not what I wanted to do, nor did I want anything so conformist as a career. So I made a conscious decision to …
Hilaire – Reborn
I'm very pleased to have this poem published on The Stare's Nest today. The poem is dedicated to Talha Ahsan, a British-born poet and translator with Asperger's syndrome. In 2012, having already been held in detention without charge in the UK for 6 years, he was extradited to the US - without any prima facie evidence being provided to a …
Hilaire 