Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

The Moon Thief in Urthona

February 28, 2017

I’ve written a poem in response to a zen koan. The Moon Thief will be published in the forthcoming spring issue of Urthona. “‘The Moon Thief ’ came out of an encounter with the koan in the poem’s epigraph: the great Zen poet Ryokan, meditating in a mountain hermitage, offers his clothes to a thief but cannot […]

categories: reflections

Live Canon 2016

November 20, 2016

Hello! Guess what? I was shortlisted for the Live Canon International Poetry Competition again. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get over to Greenwich Theatre to hear the shortlisted poems performed but am chuffed to have my poem published in their new anthology. It’s a response to Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’. […]

categories: 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

New Poems for Christmas

December 16, 2015

Ho ho ho! I have a poem in this new Christmas anthology. Each of the poems is a contemporary spin on the season to be jolly. My perhaps not-so-jolly poem, ‘The Cord’, recalls watching Nelson Mandela’s funeral on TV during the lead-in to Christmas 2013. The anthology was edited and produced by the Live Canon […]

categories: poems

Live Canon 2015 Anthology

November 19, 2015

Hello all, the new Live Canon anthology is available to buy on Amazon. In it you’ll find a new poem by Geraldine Clarkson, ‘After If–‘; Isabel Rogers’ ‘Boys in the Storm’; my poem, ‘Labyrinth’, and lots more besides. All the poems have been shortlisted for the annual Live Canon competition and the winning poem will […]

categories: poems