Once upon a time my family owned a house on a block of land in Anglesea, on the southern Victorian coast. We spent most school holidays there, the long holidays over the summer, when we'd swim and bushwalk and sometimes sail the dinghy my father built - if I remember correctly - with help from …
first Tuesday, second Wednesday
So my new year's not-quite-resolution to do less, to go out less, got off to a flying start this week when I went to two poetry events on successive nights. It was my second visit to Beyond Words in Gipsy Hill, which takes place on the first Tuesday of every month. January's star attraction was …
adieu, 2013
Paris for New Year's Eve. Et pourquoi pas? This was our incentive and reward for sticking with the French courses we'd signed up for in September. So, on 31st December we arrived in Paris early afternoon and booked into our modest 2 star hotel for a 3 night break. I'm not a huge fan of …
I blame John Hegley
Moi, je ne regrette rien. Well, I don't have many big regrets, but I do regret never having learnt to speak another language fluently. I learnt French and Russian at school; did a year of French at university before chucking in my degree; six months intensive German when I wintered, physically and emotionally, in Berlin …
dot dot dot
I am struggling to articulate my response to the Australia exhibition at the Royal Academy, which ends next Sunday. I've visited three times now. It's a big show. Each time I've spent around two hours in there. It definitely has the sense of a journey. There are some interesting echoes or counterpoints as you wander …
Curlew River
Thursday 14th November. A cold clear night. A three quarters full moon rising above the city of London. We cross from the brutalist Barbican Centre along a raised concrete walkway, down some steps and join the short queue waiting outside St Giles Cripplegate. We're here for Benjamin Britten's chamber opera Curlew River - A Parable for …
admiring Mira
Last Saturday I avoided the mayhem of the fireworks display in Battersea Park and instead took in the Mira Schendel exhibition at Tate Modern. And a thoroughly rewarding experience this was. I hadn't come across Schendel's work before, and the Tate show is a wonderful introduction to her prolific and varied output. Schendel emigrated to …
uncomfortably blonde
When I was little I had blonde hair. As I grew older it darkened to what could best be described as 'dirty blonde'. So for years, every six weeks or so, I have restored my 'natural' blondeness with the help of a home hair dye kit. I hope I'm not especially vain, but somehow 'blonde' …
lost poem
it was about sweetcorn. it was about hidden layers. it was about changing my name starting the process of becoming myself my own person. it was a statement before i knew what a statement was. i may have used husk and silky threads. grade one or grade two. stay there poem about sweetcorn with the …
I am not Frank O’Hara
but sometimes I write poems in my lunch hour. Or, to be more accurate, I muse, jot, fiddle with a poem coming-into-being. Most of my poems have a long gestation. They're a gradual accretion of words, phrases, images, and a honing and chipping away to get the shape, the movement, that I is buried somewhere …
Hilaire 