I’m the author of The First Branch (Contraband, 2021), Scattered Ashes (Oystercatcher, 2020), ibant obscuri (KFS, 2019), and Erinys: Three Studies (Oystercatcher, 2016). My poems have also appeared in Bad Lilies, Subtropics, Poetry Wales, Modern Poetry in Translation, POEM Magazine, and other places.

By day, I’m Bursar and Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. I also spend far too much time in the kitchen, and am professionally qualified in the wine trade (a long story, and far scarier than academic exams).

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Coda
(from Scattered Ashes)

disrupt the hard sell of managed experience
as the dual connotes one thing made of two &
Plato with dated breath would clinch the reference
& one missed connection winter dark can stand
for the torn fabric spell of a world behind
the all-year Christmas market in the grey
befell that in that season on a day

& the rain is constant punctuate the line
commuted 07:31 to Manchester
from the moyen âge as across town
in the great hall my beloved dazzles to camera
Malory in hand & elsewhere the antimatter
of Britain crackling demands its country back
flexing the power to hurt & will to speak

parsed bob & wheel beyond the green chapel
or there in the bottom corner of that Bruegel I’ve
riffed on before yes you & again the ripple
slowing past Reading this ballad of being alive
& in love for a blink of decades or the half
-life of a line that’s uttered & returns
echoing that the darkness comprehends

itself disconnection & for example can you
explain the farm-to-fork as anything but viral
package mimesis dislocate renew
Oxford-home-change then work the blur a trail
embedded carbon faint as parchment spell
hinting that winter night prefigured nox
perpetua & nailèd in his box

of woodsmoke or verso bound alike to mis
-translate lacunae lost to the world of day
that sudden the fire & warm dark frame a kiss
written or conjured stay with me love I pray
in Osney at the Punter as I lay
my only cards & all I have the grief
& love the syntax of this only life