At the age of eleven, I wrote a poem about the Arctic. It began:
There are six months of Arctic light
And then six months of Arctic night
The lines might have been the other way around. I don’t remember and the school magazine it was published in, and the school itself are long gone.
Obligatory juvenilia continued, all the way into my early twenties. It ended with the publication of the poem ‘Drowning’ in Spare Rib.
It got a whole page to itself, accompanied by a dark, swirling drawing. No doubt to highlight the dark swirling content of the poem.
Then I didn’t write poetry for thirty years. Not until after I’d completed an MA at the University of East Anglia, writing about poets – George Barker and Anne Sexton.
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Publication
‘Resurrection’ – Stanley Spencer Poems: An Anthology – Two Rivers Press 2017
‘The Revolutionary’ – written for and selected by The Wordsworth Trust for the Wordsworth birthday poetry competition 2016
‘The blackbirds come’ – published online by the Poetry Society for their celebration of the centenary of ‘Adelstop’ 2014
Fox Shade and Other Poems – Best of 2012 Poetry Pentathlon
‘Old lives’ – Stratagems 2007
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‘At the end’ – second prize – English Association’s 2007 Fellows’ Poetry Prize.
