Poetry

My first and enduring greatest love – though I didn’t start writing it until I was in my mid 30s. I’ve been a stop-start, over all slow writer of poetry – partly, for years, because of my very full-on job, partly because of getting into playwriting, partly ill-health and partly because I’m ill-disciplined!

I was selected as one of the UK’s Next Generation Poets, chosen every ten years, in 2004, have been a runner up in the National Poetry Competition and won prizes in various other competitions including the Troubadour and Bridport.

Individual poems have appeared in anthologies and journals including Staying Alive (Bloodaxe), The Forsaken Merman (Hodder & Stoughton), Last Words (Picador), Hand In Hand (Picador), Overheard on a Saltmarsh (Picador), Women’s Work (Seren), The Guardian, The Independent, London Magazine, Myslexia, The North, The Rialto, Stand, Poetry London.

A number of collaborations with artists working in other forms have also resulted in poetic text, including work with photographer Claire McNamee, psychotherapist and retired gastroenterologist Dr Nick Read and composer Alison West.

Most recently I have written the texts for two of Manchester Camerata’s UNTOLD series of new format digital films. Watch them below ⇩

I’ve featured as the poet in BBC Radio 3s NORTHERN DRIFT (March 2022), broadcast an audio version of “Notes on Water” for BBC Radio 3 and published a lyric essay in The Poetry Review, Autumn 2022 (available to buy here)

Bird on a Wire

A poem from STRAY

Usually they remind me of Leonard Cohen’s song
and you say they’re notes on a stave
but that September day I agreed, the swallows came
like a falling scale, some landing as chords in the bass
under single lines of startling melody.

We knew they were heading for Africa,
thousands of miles on the wing
but they were hardly birds that day.
You took a photograph for every move they made,
a thousand shots - their journey didn’t matter.

It took you a week to translate wires into staves,
a month to decide which birds should perch as quavers,
which as crotchets, semibreves, and then November
you transcribed them for soprano voice with piano,
sung to tswit-tswitt-tswitt, feetafeet-feetafeetafitt.

I grew tired of it, read bird books by the dozen
as you cut and pasted photographs. I wished you’d sleep.
December it was done, your masterpiece.
You drank to the birds, went out alone, drifted
home at dawn to a room still strewn with manuscript

and through the window – this is true –
a swallow perched on the washing line.
Was it lost or hurt?
Just late?
Would it stand a chance of crossing the Sahara?

I found you in the middle of the room, in tears, like a child,
left you to it, made some tea,
couldn’t bring myself to ask if you were crying
for a bird that wouldn’t make it, or a missing note,
recovered far too late and in the wrong place.