Quick, and other poems

I’ve written poetry since I was sixteen. It’s my first love and my enduring refuge. It’s the form I go to when I’ve had enough of collaboration, where I can be alone with the words and have complete autonomy. Which isn’t to say that I don’t submit my poems to the scrutiny of others. Over the years, the poet Meg Peacocke and my friend Nigel Pollitt have been exemplars and mentors. As with the rest of my writing, it took me a long time to take my poetry seriously enough to consider publication. I got there in the end.

QUICK, my first collection, was published by Valley Press in 2016. A poem from QUICK ('After The Event') was longlisted for The National Poetry Competition the same year. A new collection, FRISK is out with Yaffle (2020). I’m currently working on a 3rd collection, provisionally entitled Passing Place.

I love editing, and dramatising, other poets’ work. INTERFERENCE, an anthology of Czechoslovak poetry, with a foreword by the poet Miroslav Holub, was published by New Clarion Press in 1992. This had its origin in a theatre collage, with Brett Hornby on saxophone, which toured nationally in the dying moments of communist Czechoslovakia in 1989.

In 2010 I was commissioned, with Antony Dunn, by Leeds City Council to produce two poems for marble benches in Kirkgate, Leeds. And from 2017-19 I was Artist in Residence for The Scott Creative Arts Foundation where I wrote a series of poems, PARZIVAL AGAIN, for an exhibition with photographer Lucy Saggers and a film about the Scotts with film maker Andy Wood.

In the meantime, my poetry has taken another, more applied, drection. Over the last three years, myself and photographer Lizzie Coombes have created over 400 POEM PORTRAITS of individuals in children's centres, elderly people's homes, libraries, and with voluntary organisations. A Poem Portrait is the merging in one artwork of a poem and photographic image of a person. Exhibited as a group, they form a snapshot of a team, a community, or a group at a certain moment in time.

I hope that I convey some of the visceral excitement I get from reading poetry to the individuals and groups I work with.