I’ve gone through one of those regular, and probably necessary, periods when I’ve stopped having much regard for poetry, especially my own. Fortunately, my teaching forces me to keep my hand in, and I’m always grateful to my students, whose dedication and enthusiasm ends up being infectious, and pulls me back in, when otherwise I might drift away and find something else to occupy my time.
This least year has all been about balancing my novel writing with being a father to two young children (and one much older child), and that has often proved to be rather challenging. Still, the novel is now finished, and I’ve made the first moves to offer it up to the world, and with that time not writing, I’ve started thinking again, and that inevitably leads to more poems.
Wild Court published three poems of mine late last year, all three of which are very dear to me for one reason or another. If I have to pick a favourite, it would be the poem about my father and the Shropshire floods (although the Harry Dean Stanton poem runs it pretty close).
‘My father sends me photos of the floods
at the same time each year: the glut
of water swamping the Welsh bridge
around which I would kill time
in a junk-shop warren gone the way
of its trade, the toffee water thick
with silt, lolling like a passenger
dozing against one’s arm, photos
of the streets turned to canals
swamping sandbags and doorsteps
running off the mountains fed
by great cords of water, photos
pinging onto technology, slim
incisions into what had been home’
The High Window has also made me the featured poet for this current issue. The collection here draws from some poems from my collection West South North, North South East, but there are some previously unpublished poems here, too. I’m particularly proud of ‘The Last Water’:
‘We came to the lake through a wood,
the cold waiting for us in shadows,
like puddles of autumn, the world
already drowned in our longing.
Granite and oolite studded the path,
rough quartz, brazen as sea shells,
although our heathen days
made us resist the lesson of parables,
as we had moved towards stories
of pure invention.’
Absence Club 