Recent Poems

As well as learning to blog I have also written three poems in the past week.

On Friday evening I was reading Zbigniew Herbert in the bath, feeling playful, unpunctuated and anti-poetic.

The result was a mental draft of 'On Haemorrhoids' I had simply to commit to paper once I'd dried off. Sunday night I shifted a few words about for ease of reading, and finished it off.

The style isn't typically mine but I think the humour and delight in linking a disparate bunch of sufferers definitely are. On an only marginally more meaningful level the poem is also about achievement being frustrated by physicality.

I don't send poems off to magazines as regularly as I used to but I'd be interested to know which ones would consider such a poem. I suspect like many other poets I have squirreled away dozens of poems over the years because they appear at variance with most of the rest of my published work. Perhaps eventually they will make up a collection of their own.

'Undiscovered' stems from a documentary I watched last month about Egyptian boat builders. The programme was pretty boring but I started wondering about the intense passion some people have for the past.

In the poem I try to capture something of that sense of curiosity and wonder by imagining the different places where different valuable objects still lie hidden.

'Post-apocalyptic' stems from some notes I made after a walk on New Year's Day in Leicestershire.

The details didn't cohere until I'd watched the film 'The Road' the other week, after which I had the unifying theme.

I enjoyed writing this one. I like describing urban, rural and suburban locations in an impersonal way and letting the detail convey the meaning. I've always been particularly impressed when I've seen it in the poems of Michael Hofmann and Charles Wright, and more recently in the prose of Iain Sinclair.

These three poems came after a few weeks of not writing any poems. I fully expect a similarly fallow period to follow.

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