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Published in Snakeskin this month, with a sung version here.
11 Monday Mar 2024
Posted Love songs
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Published in Snakeskin this month, with a sung version here.
09 Tuesday May 2023
Posted Love songs
inTags
02 Sunday Jan 2022
Posted Publications, Songs
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Ben Okri, Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan, Dunkeld, Edinburgh Book Festival, George Mackay Brown, Kenneth Steven, Pitlochry, Robert Burns, Snakeskin
My poem, “Soon to Be Sixty”, has been published in this month’s Snakeskin.
Here is the song version, followed by a recording:
Soon to Be Sixty
I discover a favourite writer
with every new decade that turns.
At ten I would gladly recite a
“Some hae meat…” by the bard, Rabbie Burns.
“Some hae meat…” by Rabbie Burns.
At twenty Bob Dylan disarmed me
with “Tangled Up in Blue”.
“Simple Twist of Fate” really charmed me.
“You’re a Big Girl Now” turned the screw.
“Tangled Up in Blue”.
At thirty I chanced on a master,
an Orcadian, George Mackay Brown.
He mingled success with disaster.
He knew that the king was a clown.
George Mackay Brown.
At forty I heard Kenneth Steven
bring a Christmas Day in at Dunkeld
with a story he seemed to believe in
of a baby that he almost held.
Kenneth Steven at Dunkeld.
At fifty I witnessed Ben Okri
in Edinburgh at the Book Fair.
Perhaps he’ll be on at Pitlochry
one of these days while I’m there.
Ben Okri at the Fair.
I’m due to hit sixty next summer.
Whose talent will thicken the plot?
A poet, a singer, a strummer?
I love all of these guys such a lot.
I love all of these guys a lot.
I love all of these guys a lot.
02 Thursday Mar 2017
Posted Sonnets
inA revised and expanded version of my sonnet collection has been published online today.
01 Thursday Dec 2016
Posted Publications, Sonnets
inI’ve just had this poem published in Snakeskin #235. I wrote the first draft over five years ago, then put it aside and forgot about it. I discovered it again by chance about 50 days ago. It will be the first in a sequence of four called “The Four Tempers” in my upcoming, second edition of I Sing the Sonnet, which Snakeskin plans to publish in the near future.
02 Tuesday Aug 2016
Posted Publications, Sonnets
in05 Saturday Dec 2015
Posted Publications, Sonnets
inThis poem, just published in Snakeskin #224, i.e. the 20th anniversary issue, is to be the very first one in future versions of my collection, From Moonrise till Dawn.
07 Tuesday Jul 2015
Posted Publications, Sonnets
inTags
I woke at 4 one night two months ago and witnessed my wife doing exercises while sleeping. After recovering my composure, I found this phenomenon could easily be described in a line of IP: “My wife does exercises in her sleep.” I then began to construct a sonnet. The word “parachute” popped up as a word to conclude with rather early on, which was quite a help, as then it was just a matter of filling in from A to B. At one point I gave myself the advice of reducing the pentameter to tetrameter as the IP seemed bloated.
“Look! We Have Landed!” (a reference to D.H. Lawrence’s poetry collection from 1917, Look! We Have Come Through!) is in this month’s issue of Snakeskin.
03 Friday Apr 2015
Posted Ditties, Publications, Sonnets
inI’ve been playing quite a lot of chess over the last 1½ years, both online and over the board. I played quite a bit as a kid, but other interests, not least poetry, elbowed their way into the foreground. What started me off again was writing this sonnet:
Chess with Monsieur Joffroy
In memory of Frédérique Joffroy (1962-1980)
Losing to me wasn’t the badge of shame
your father thought it was. He couldn’t stop
the stronger player coming out on top.
It came as quite a shock to hear him claim
my proletarian tactics were to blame.
It’s standard stuff to snatch a pawn, then swap
off all the pieces; suicide to drop
the basic principle behind the game.
To think that he was meant to be the host!
We were thirteen, your father forty-four.
Five years later I was told, by post,
that you, my friend, had hanged yourself. Your ghost
jolted my memory. Outplayed once more,
your father kicked the table to the floor.
It was published in CHESS Magazine in January. At my suggestion, I was given a year’s subscription instead of payment.
Chess has now elbowed poetry into the background. Until last month I hadn’t written anything for half a year. Then I wrote this. A friend of mine, Nigel Stuart, has added two more stanzas, which he has given me permission to post here:
Though they might seem distinct, as the white and the black,
xxxchiaroscuro best lights each endeavour –
while the whitest of knights treads a devious track,
xxxpawns transgendered as queens render pleasure,
and a sinuous line, in conception divine,
xxxoften issues in muddles of meaning,
and an image whose shine, past attempts to refine
xxxits expression, turns out overweening.
Though some poetry seems by illumining dreams
xxxto rival the light of the cinema,
neo-realist themes and their verismo gleams,
xxxshow illusory scenes, not dissimilar.
Every struggling art, when considered apart,
xxxseems a separate route to redemption,
yet one finds at its heart there’s inscribed from the start,
xxxfrom exposure – there’s never exemption.
04 Friday Apr 2014
Posted Publications
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