Bard's life

Th is time last year my poe m, Stone Witness , commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day 2016, was broadcast nationwide.  The iconic subject of the poem, La Gran’mere du Chimquiere , is a 4,000 year old statue-menhir situated at the gate of St Martin’s parish church in Guernsey.   She is thought to bring good luck and fertility to those who place a garland of flowers on her.  The poem is written in the imagined voice of La Gran'mere . STONE WIT N ESS   ( La Gran'mere du Chimquiere )         

Stone, 
old, old stone, I groan with age.

 Gran’mere , Earth Mother,  
I stand sentry beyond the churchyard gate, 
and watch, with sightless eyes,
 the snail of human traffic creep along.

 I am old and granite-cold: your island’s anchor-stone.

 Your fathers’ fathers came to me  
to pray, to lay or lift some minor curse: 
 an endless chain of island men, 
 one generation to another, 
 linked. 

 Four thousand years grown ol...

It hardly seems a year since I was commissioned by the BBC to write for National Poetry Day 2016. The result was the poem, Stone Witness ( La Gran'm e re du Chimquiere ) which, shortly thereafter, formed the nucleus of a poetry collection built around that iconic subject. This year's National Poetry Day is today, Thursday 28 September 2017.   The theme is “Freedom” . FREEDOM Locate the lock, insert a key then turn it. Suddenly you’re free. Step into light. Inhale fresh air. Allow a breeze to lift your hair. Glance round, observe: this is the world spread out before you, bright, unfurled. Did you imagine, when in chains, the subject of endless campaigns, how flowers explode in yellows, pinks, how every living creature links one to the other, how the sky astonishes the human eye, how birds fly free unknowingly, how, when you were a detainee, you watched, through bars, bright swallows glide, the air their element ? You cried because your prison world was square while they had ...

Like most creative writers I experience periods of despondency when I become convinced that I will never again write anything of consequence and that whatever small talent I may once have possessed has been squandered or extinguished by time. During our recent trip to Venice, we once again lodged at our beloved Ca ' Biondetti , the home of celebrated 18th Century Italian artist, Rosalba Carriera , and more recently the American novelist, Henry James.  The apartment consists of a number of rooms on the ground floor of the old house whose windows look out on the Grand Canal where much of the daily life of Venice takes place. I took this photograph during the annual Regatta whilst Jane and I sipped Bellinis and enjoyed the spectacle . The list of artists and writers who have lived in or visited this uniquely beautiful city is substantial: Robert Browning, Josef Brodsky, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Marcel Proust and John Ruski...

This month's Open Mic Night for poetry will take place at La Villette Hotel on Monday, 25th September at 8pm.   As always, all are welcome. Come along to read, c hat or simply listen.  The optional theme for the event is "Off the Wall" .  The musical slot will be filled by the ever-popular acoustic duo , Blue Mountains. T he standard definition of the expression " o ff the wall" is eccentric or unconventional and some m ay regard the colour s of the houses on the Venetian island of Burano in that way .  J ane and I visited Burano th is spring when the quality of light enhanced the already spectacular hues.   This charming small hideaway is the home of lace-making in the Veneto , a delightful place and a welcome escape from the cruise-ship hordes jostling for space La Serenissima i tself .  

Returning from Italy recently, I was saddened to read of the death of J P Donleavy , author of a much-loved novel from my teenage years, The Ginger Man .  Set in Dublin, The Ginger Man is a lengthy, stream-of-consciousness tale about an amoral American student at Trinity College who drinks to excess, chases women and gets into a variety of scrapes with his off-beat acquaintances and creditors.  The critically acclaimed novel was originally banned as obscene in both the USA and Ireland but eventually achieved acceptance and is now considered a contemporary classic, having sold more than 45 million copies worldwide. The Ginger Man was written in a structurally modernist style with sudden and rapid shifts between first and third person perspective. It shunned conventional narration and, for the very young man that I then was, provided an exciting departure from the conventional literary forms I had encountered at school.   J P Donleavy went on to write several other no...

"Things fall apart ; the ce ntre cannot hold"   W B Yeats We live in alarming times. Not since the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962 have I been quite so aware of how slender are the threads that hold our world together.  The words of Irish poet, W B Yeats , from his poem The Second Coming , written nearly one hundred years ago, seem frighteningly apposite in the face of recent global events.  FIST OF FURY The noise is                       sudden   shocking    deafening. Our upturned faces glimpse a bullet-black projectile traversing sky                  so fast                   we barely comprehend it. Then comes the sound ... a massive fist colliding with some solid thing a mighty...