When I first started reading and writing poetry in the early 1990s Basil Bunting was hard to stumble across. Anthologies like The Faber Book of Modern Verse included extracts from Briggflatts, and in Croydon public library I once found a scuffed volume containing the whole thing; there was a wonderful essay in Thom Gunn’s Shelf Life; but mostly it was as if Bunting – then only eight years dead – had been airbrushed out of the picture. Continue reading →

On Friday my wife and I took advantage of the Ashmolean’s late-night opening for the final week of the Francis Bacon / Henry Moore exhibition. The evening slot allowed us to miss the daytime crowds and enjoy dinner in the restaurant afterwards (giving some much-needed time to digest what we’d just seen). The exhibition itself was excellent. Continue reading →

Twelve years ago, the enviably-talented Nick Maitland suggested collaborating on a project: a sequence of poems (mine) and paintings (Nick’s) would co-evolve over a number of months, with drafts and sketches bouncing off one another. Half the fun would be plunging in without a clear plan and seeing where the thing took us. But we struggled to find the right starting point and nothing came of it.  Continue reading →