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Welcome
Please enjoy the poetry I have written throughout my life. Just click on a theme or browse the full collection below.


R.I.P. IKE
In a Normandy field Under hedges’ shade The headstones gather, Shadows edge Over ageing stone, Short rows close Under trellis and rose...
14 views


Van Gogh Self Portrait
His eyes look over our left shoulder searching in an unseen mirror, pondering his own reflective self. White stands for thought he’d...
12 views


Henry Collins, obiit Dec 1969
Gaunt arms and grey gloves direct the hearse, direct us all to park in spaces under names upon tablets on a wall. Soft music plays. We...
18 views


Magritte’s La Bonne Aventure
His wintry trees branch bare across the evening sky And grow in orange light behind two windows. The chimneys of three jet black houses...
112 views


To Anne on her Fiftieth Birthday
It has gone fast, life, And your children now travel As you, too, have travelled To a world long beyond us To which I was stranger. But...
42 views


Last of Four
I missed your birth - the only one of the four I did not see. The celebration of your infancy was overlaid with care, so now there are...
39 views


Lines for my Daughters
The day after your uncle turned three, The world changed. Standing on Euston Station, Another uncle in your grandma’s arms, A siren’s...
24 views


Ambroise Vollard
Sustained by strong black coffee, He sits there immobile On a rickety chair on a rickety platform, Under the warning, watchful eye Of...
9 views


The Castle in the Pyrenees
Suspend your disbelief. This Is not a rock, a boulder or a stone About to drop. Magritte Is there to fool you into truth, A kind of...
12 views


Montparnasse in August
A door bangs and a telephone rings, Someone laughs and someone sings And somewhere a jazz trumpet plays. The outside enters in other...
12 views


Providence
She lives today who might have died had you not taken that particular path, under the tower, across the vacant square, past registers of...
8 views


Salvadore Quasimodo
Translations by Terry Hodgson On the Branches of the Willow Trees And how could we sing With an alien foot set on our hearts Among the...
17 views


Walking North
Above the ramparts of Iford Hill, The sun dipped low in a green sky, Rodmell Church lay between trees, And up the valley a cold wind...
23 views


Slow Train East
for Auntie Maddy A roar past the carriage window Hurries on westwards. In the silence pursuing, In a meadow, slow-moving, Two lovers...
6 views


Mehr Licht
for Karlheinz Stockhausen They say Karlheinz asserts The greatest work of art was when The 767s destroyed World Trade But opines that...
2 views


Set the Bar High
For Dick Fosbury, 1968 Olympian Gold Medallist With a step, skip and hop he went over the top with the Fosbury flop. In eight or ten...
21 views


Leonardo's Shield
When he was small Leonardo Formed a scene upon a shield, From crickets, fireflies,bats, Lizards, glow worms, serpents, And delicate wings...
11 views
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