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Over the past few weeks I’ve been out and about with my new book, doing gigs in pubs and in cafes, universities and independent bookshops. It’s been joyous – like most poets, I get a tremendous buzz out of putting my…

I don’t often get round to talking about my poetry. For the most part, I’d far rather my poems spoke for themselves: they’re likely to be every bit as eloquent, far less prone to heading off at a tangent, and…

Well, we are living in interesting times, aren’t we? At the start of this week, the news that West Belfast rap band Kneecap are taking Kemi Badenoch (currently Secretary of State for Business and Trade, though we’ll see how long…

The start of the year has turned out to be remarkably busy. Some of that’s good (gigs, poetry writing, friends visiting, thank you very much) and some of it’s been more of a slog (yes, Arts Council funding bid, I’m…

This week, I’ve begun taking ‘snapshots…‘ out on the road. It’s been a lot of fun, and if the rest of the poetry year turns out to be half as good as these few days in the middle of a…

has been playing on my mind since I first saw it several weeks ago, when the horror in Gaza was still relatively new. It has been playing on my mind over these long weeks since, weeks where politicians and pundits…

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about language, and the way it’s used. Not such an unusual thing for a poet to do, you might think, but I’ve been focussing on how our media use language,…

So here’s a true story for you. Earlier this week I was in Leeds, and met up with an old friend who’s over from the US. We spent the day mooching round the city centre, marvelling at the beauty of…

Over the past couple of months I’ve been putting together a new collection of poems. It’s called snapshots from the fall of home and features poems that have been placed in competitions, found their way into anthologies, and circulated online,…

I don’t remember when I first got to know photographer John Sevigny, but I do remember why. Somehow, years ago, via the wonder of social media, I’d seen one of his pictures: a black-and-white image of a statue of Our…