I’ve been hugely busy of late with family and work, and the spare moments have seen me working on a new novel. All of this means that I’ve fallen behind with many things, and that includes posting things on this blog. Here’s a recent piece: a personal essay on a poetry collection by Robert Selby, published on The High Window.
‘Sometime in the late nineties, I found myself working in a library, the first in what you might think of as white collar opportunities after I finished my degree in American and English Literature. I’d specialised in poetry (writing it and writing about it) but the years after my degree had been rootless, and the job represented the first time I’d given myself a bit of direction. In bored moments between tasks, I launched myself into internet poetry. It didn’t take me long to find Angel Exhaust, the journal of avant-garde poetry loosely associated with the later poets of the British Poetry Revival. I knew some of the names in Angel Exhaust from Conductors of Chaos, the Iain Sinclair-edited anthology from the mid-nineties. I didn’t always understand what I read, but I stuck with it as I felt it represented a logical conclusion to the work I’d pursued through my university career. You’re young: you choose a fork in the path.’
Read more here.
Absence Club 