I’ve added a new page – Poetry – to this website. You can access it by clicking on the tab that appears in the top right of the screen.

All the works that appear there are my own.

“Unlocking“, the first piece I’m publishing, was the fruit of a 21-word poetry challenge.

The Dead

The dead are always looking down on us, they say.
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

Chapelsphere is the title of a poem I entered for the Fish Publishing International Poetry Contest. As per rules of the compettion, I cannot upload the poem to my website until the results are announced on the 30th April. However, I would like to share with you the first-ever professional critique for one of my pieces.

Chapelsphere saw its inception well over 10 years ago but at some point I lost the original manuscript. I managed to reconstruct most of it from memory some weeks back while also developing it further.

          CRITIQUE

          Chapelsphere

This imagistic poem is packed with evocative sonic and semantic intensity. The deployment of consonance, (in particular the recurrence of the S echoing the hushed tone embedded in the image itself  and the physical space) and the refreshing word association and visualization works well to fire up the auditory imagination and create a sharp emotive impact. The construction of each image inclines the reader to construct a narrative around it amplifying the tension between expansion and containment of the verse particularly in the last stanza, where the vertical connections of heavy/devotion and seeped/sins combined with the accentuated stress on the end word create an interesting sequence of association. The second stanza achieves this same level of density with the linking of flake/haloes and settle/souls however; the first stanza does not fully harness this vertical pairing and the opening word of the poem, “Atmosphere” feels too drawn compared to the subsequent clipped short verse that follows. The ending is solid and rounded bringing us back to the “Sphere” of the title. Increasing the immediacy of the opening verse would further improve this well-crafted and potent poem.