Poetry

Anthologies

Places of Poetry: Mapping the Nation in Verse
(Oneworld Publications, 2020)

Contains my poem ‘Towers of Orkney’ and is available from Oneworld and all good bookshops.

Edited by Andrew McRae, the anthology presents the best poems from the nationwide Places of Poetry project, selected from over 7,500 entries.

The Places of Poetry website is now closed to further entries, but the wealth of poems included can still be explored.


The Result Is What You See Today (Smith|Doorstop, 2019)

Includes my poem ‘The Ultra Runner’ and is available from The Poetry Business and bookstores.

Curated by poet-runners Ben Wilkinson, Kim Moore and Paul Deaton, The Result is What You See Today threads running and poetry through myriad routes, venturing into the how, why and where of a timeless human act.

This affirmative anthology shows that poetry and running have much in common, fulfilling a basic need to live freely, expressively and to feel alive. 


Two poems from The Hudson Review, Spring 2020
‘Just So’ and ‘Scooter Hero’

A poem from The Manchester Review, Issue 22:
The Fates Visit a House which is not Charles Darwin’s

A poem Highly Commended in the 2017 Bristol Poetry Prize:
Spring and the Pig Mother

You may catch sight of her
early in the year, when the moon
is a bright slit
no thicker than a new-born’s tail.
She will be standing with arms lifted,
pale and still as a ghost gum against the sky.

For a bare hour
she wraps the night around her
and conducts it like a sea.
A curl of her hand starts currents
that draw the breaths
out of all the creatures on the farm

and sends them back, charged and fertile.
The crops in the fields fatten,
even the worms
and crawling insects feel
a new sharpness and scurry
more boldly about their business.

When it’s done, she stoops and shuffles
back into the heavy skin.
Rolling belly-up
she invites them all to come to her.
In the dark she takes
their hundred sucking mouths.

Comment from judge Liz Berry: Oh I loved this wild, strange folkloric poem and wished I had written it, especially those wonderful final lines.

Two poems published on Ink, Sweat and Tears:
The Woodsman
Self-portrait with Spiders