The starting point of my latest collection, Letter-winged Kite, was the discovery of this simple fact: every bird in the world has a common English name. That strikes me as extraordinary. A...
Letter-winged Kite
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MY JOURNAL
An occasional meditation on books, editions, libraries, nature, bugbears. You can see my latest posts at the top, and you can scroll down for the blog archive.
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Richard Smyth: An Indifference of Birds
Birds & People; Man & Birds; Birds & Men. This is by no means the first book to investigate our relationship with avian life. But we know what to expect from those others, their...
Found e-poetry, or e-found poetry?
Over the past century or so, since found poetry has been a ‘thing’, texts have been sourced largely from printed matter in all its diversity, from an auctioneer’s catalogue (Thomas A Clark) to...
What’s so special about birds?
I’m in my Shropshire garden, an untidy patch whose lower slopes were last seen pitching into woods somewhere toward the River Severn. The rain stopped a little while ago, and the air’s full of that...
Libraries, Amazon, and the devaluation of books
I’m visiting Doncaster, where I drop in to the library in Bawtry to do some work and, out of habit, become a member. Bawtry is a community library, and the volunteer who processes my application is...
Alison Brackenbury: Gallop
The cover of Alison Brackenbury’s Selected Poems, Gallop, reproduces Franz Marc’s ‘Two Horses, 1912.’ And there recurs, in the backbeat of these welcoming verses, a vision of an enviable life of...
Kevin Boniface: Round About Town
There have been armies of journalists out on the streets of Britain in the lead up to the December, 2019, general election. They’ve been dropping in on deprived areas, places where the demographic...
Ironbridge cooling towers demolition
Friday, 6 December. The cooling towers of Ironbridge B Power Station are being taken down today. A big event round this part of Shropshire where, for the entire lives of anyone aged much less than...
Community and volunteer-run libraries
I’m visiting the library in Dunchurch, near Rugby, the very picture of a best- kept village competition winner. As soon as I step across the threshold I can tell it is a community, or volunteer-run,...
Anthony Etherin: Stray Arts
Stray arts, the title of a new poetry collection from Anthony Etherin, is a wee bow, the daintiest of fastenings, that we untie simply by running our eyes backwards and… yes, it’s a palindrome....
A few lines on David Connearn
Since the early 1980s, David Connearn has established a distinct and intriguing manner of drawing. It chimes with one of the tenets of conceptualism of the period, in that the mechanical process may...
Cory Harding: The perfect stranger
“Every night I left the earth and floated above the city in search of the perfect stranger. As I floated thru the damp clouds with my arms outstretched I let out a long piercing scream. All I ever...
Finding Dick Bruna at Centraal Museum, Utrecht
The first thing to get over on your visit to Centraal Museum, Utrecht, is the old familiar complaint: Why is everything so much better in Europe? And it is great here, a lovely airy space on the...
Brian Lane
As I write this, it is twenty years to the day since the death of Brian Lane, at the age of 57. Brian was a powerhouse who put work above all other concerns, reflected in a legacy of meticulous...
Two libraries in one day: Newcastle
I’m in the Newcastle area, and have a chance to visit two examples of the shock new wave of library design from the early 1960s, when post-war austerities were finally shaken off, public funds for...
Percy Grainger’s free music machines
The Free Music Machine Drawings of Percy Grainger, ed. Simon Cutts, with an introduction by Wilfrid Mellers. Coracle, 2014 * At a dinner party once, amid William Morris-ish surroundings, I remember...
Edward Hopper, Camberwell
I was working at Coracle Press gallery in Camberwell in 1984, a year when there was much analysis of the coming of age of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which of course had been written in...
The earliest wild birdsong recording
Wildlife photography pioneers Richard and Cherry Kearton began their work in 1892; by 1900, they had published six bird books, including the first ever catalogue of the nests and eggs of British...
What has happened to Guildford Public Library?
Growing up, I thought all libraries were like my local one: a quirky, rose-pink prefab chalet that had touched down from outer space in a gap between staid Victorian shops. It felt like stepping...
Bat / study
In our house in Broseley, Shropshire, we had a long room on the first floor, originally two smallish square rooms, since knocked together. We made it our study/workroom, with a couple of desks, a...
Everybody gasped: a poetry faux-pas
Some years back I went to an event given by Richard Kostelanetz at the Frankfurt Book Fair. This was a reading of work that seems to belong in that fertile delta where found text meets poetry meets...
“Between jargon and jazz”: page-heading poetry
In a previous post (Surrey: A cutout poem, 2 August 2019), I described the cut-out technique of moving a window-slot in a piece of card across book or newspaper text as a way of creating new...
Plaster casts in the V&A Museum
Down in the crypt of the Victoria & Albert Museum there was, until recently, an in-house printing department, with typesetting, repro, a couple of Heidelbergs, print finishing, bindery and...
#BookCover2019
A couple of days ago I was invited – challenged – on Twitter by my friend Peter Foolen @peterfoolen to take part in the #BookCover2019 challenge. Each participant is to tweet the image of a...
Two Leicestershire libraries
In the morning I’m in go-ahead Market Harborough, where I discover the public library housed in a converted corset factory in – would you believe it? – Adam and Eve Street. It is a handsome, bright...
Surrey: a cutout poem
When my Mum died last year, I wrote a poem to read at her funeral. It features among other personal memories a glimpse of the North Downs looming over my parents’ house, the childhood downs that had...
Nature writing 2019/1919
Have been thinking recently about the quality of nature writing: more particularly, about the distance the writer enables between what is observed and how it is written up. What gets in the way is...
Two Wolverhampton libraries
Today I’m visiting two public libraries run by the City of Wolverhampton Council, one modern, one eighty years older, each in its very different way an embodiment of the spirit of the time and...
Substance, shadow and reflection
The origins of this image are owed to an early photograph taken by Richard and Cherry Kearton. The location of the shot is easy to find: walking out from Caterham, cross the by-pass onto the chalk...
Herewith the clues
First published eighty years ago this month, Herewith the Clues was the fourth and final title in Hutchinson’s innovative series of crime dossiers. These dispensed with a conventional detective...
Cloud study
I have on my table a battered blue hardback, picked up in the early 1980s in Charing Cross Road. Cloud Studies, by Arthur W. Clayden, was published by John Murray in 1905. It was by no means the...
The Reading Cafe, York
A visit to York this week, with some time to fill, gives me the opportunity to tick off one of the public libraries on my list: the Reading Café in Rowntree Park. Books and cafés under one roof are...
Birds and vocabulary
I was working earlier this year on a project called Letter-winged Kite, a collection which uses world bird names as “found” material for new poetic contexts. It was only when I reached the final...
Outdoor Leisure 18
We were staying for a week in a cottage in North Wales with a couple of friends. They had brought some guide books and maps, one of them an old Ordnance Survey Outdoor Leisure map, the series with...
Saltash Library, Cornwall
Drive west from Plymouth across the Tamar Bridge, and be ready with the brake pedal, for Saltash is situated about two seconds into Cornwall. A beautiful spot, it hangs high above the river, the...
Two egrets
I didn’t get into birdwatching until my late twenties when, shamed to realise I didn’t know the name of a small blue and yellow bird in the garden, I bought a field guide, learned much of it by...
Long, or longer, after Walter Pater
This begins in the early 1990s, when Tom and Laurie Clark invited friends and supporters to submit an original A4 artwork for inclusion in a fund-raising group exhibition at Cairn Gallery,...