Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

The Chalk Path – poetry PDF

July 24, 2016

My latest poetry pamphlet is now available as a free PDF. In The Chalk Path, Joe, Hugh, and myself turn our attention landward from the coast. The poems are drawn from walks over chalk downs, train rides beside white horses etched into hillsides and, in contrast, the bright red sandstone of my Mercian homelands. Read it online […]

categories: journeys, poems

Failure

July 20, 2016

The ship’s design pictured is the Titanic. The cross-section is drawn at full scale and the length at quarter scale. I visited the Titanic exhibition in Belfast recently. The timing couldn’t have been better as I’ve been reading Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking, about how we learn from failures both catastrophic and small. The ‘unsinkable’ […]

categories: essays, reflections

The Tide Clock proof has arrived

May 19, 2015

The new poetry pamphlet I’ve been working on with Hugh Greasley and Joe Franklin has arrived in proof form. There are a couple of minor errors to be fixed: I didn’t leave enough room between the bleed and the page margin on the cover, for one thing. These should now be resolved and I’ve put […]

categories: poems

Sea music: foreword to a poetry pamphlet

April 2, 2015

I’m hoping to send our new poetry pamphlet to the printers this weekend. It’s the second collaboration between myself and poets Joe Franklin and Hugh Greasley. To whet your appetite, here’s a draft of the foreword: Sea music Ted Hughes once said that if the reason we travelled to the coast during our holidays was to relax, […]

categories: essays, poems, reflections

Shigeru’s Cave

December 11, 2014

i. When Shigeru was twelve, he found a cave no one else had explored. The other boys avoided that part of the wood. Their base bordered the hillside near a soldier’s grave now used as a bookmark for civic grief but Shigeru went on deeper forays into the forest. He staged one man plays under […]

categories: poems