When I edited Magma 34 I was thrilled to publish the first translations in the UK of tanka by Machi Tawara. Tawara is a superstar in her native Japan – her first book, Salad Anniversary, sold over 2.5 million copies and she’s a familiar face to TV audiences as well as poetry readers. This Sunday […]
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Reading at the Magma 55 Launch – Monday 25 February
My poem ‘The Future’ is published in issue 55 of Magma Poetry, out now. I’ll be reading it at the launch next Monday 25th February, at The Troubadour, with other readers including Penelope Shuttle and Clare Pollard. Tim Kindberg and Karen McCarthy Woolf have a great theme for the issue – The Soul and the […]
Reading at The Shuffle, Saturday 26th January
This Saturday 26th January I’ll be reading some of my poems at The Shuffle, hosted by Jacqueline Saphra at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden. There will be ‘feature sets’ from Peter Armstrong, Fran Lock and Anne Berkeley. Rowena Knight and I will be reading shorter sets, and a ‘short star turn’ has just been […]
“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care”
As an absorbing evocation of Shakespeare’s life in London, Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street is up there with Peter Ackroyd’s biography and James Shapiro’s 1599. Starting with the one surviving fragment of Shakespeare’s recorded speech, from a testimony in a civil court, Nicholl ferrets out a mind-boggling array of facts, inferences and […]
The Four Subjects of Lyric Poetry
a short but comprehensive summary of subjects for lyric poetry. I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious. We’re not getting any younger. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey. Sadness seems but the other side of the […]