Poetry
Welcome to my poetry page.
I gradually fell into poetry in my late teens and early 20s, in the beginning not very sure what poetry actually was, but intrigued to play with it. By my mid-20s I was privately considering myself a poet. I had learned to look at things around me with a view to describing them in an arresting way. I tried some blank-verse monologues a la Browning. I tried ballad stanzas. I discovered haiku. Your poetic impulses choose you rather than the other way around.
My first serious publication was around 1970 in Workshop magazine, edited by Norman Hidden. There were numerous little mags after that, and two “Introduction” books published by John Calder in 1979 and Faber and Faber in 1986, and then finally a pamphlet of poems about The Netherlands, Dutch Interiors, in 1988. Other anthologies and little mags followed; Big Little Poems published a group of my poems in Outside the Chain of Hands (1994), and then a full collection, Below the Surface, was published by Loxwood-Stoneleigh in 1996.
Below the Surface contains more than the usual “first collection” might because it was a long time coming and I had been publishing poems for 25 years. For that reason it is not very cohesive in the sense of having a particular theme or subject. It is really a “selected” from all those years, and even contains the complete texts of two pamphlets, Dutch Interiors and Down Where the Willow is Washing Her Hair. Some of them are a bit surreal (and dated!) like “The Man Has Come to Tune the Typewriter”; others are more serious, like the villanelle “Any Hourglass Holds Just So Much Sand” and the title poem, which is in several sections and weaves together a high school class reunion, the familiar/unfamiliar return to a hometown, and an interment in a cemetery.
All the Tea in China is very much about one subject: the experiences in the early 1990s of a foreign lecturer in China, mainly at Suzhou University, although some are more general and a few date from a tour of Chinese universities in the previous year. Some are about my students (“The Exact Time is All Depends”, “Miss Zhou Drops a Bombshell”) or the campus (“Avenue of Gingkoes”) or my teaching (“Foreign Expert”, “Beowulf in China”), some are about other people in the city (“A Visit to the Chop-Carver”), some are about visits to other parts of China (“In Yangzhou for Semester Break”, “Banquet in Hangzhou”). They are what I wrote instead of a diary.
Besides Down Where the Willow is Washing her Hair, Hearing Eye also brought out two other pamphlets, Twelve Scenes of Malta (2000) and Friends in the Country (2004), and then in 2009 a collection of 100 haiku, The Wisteria’s Children.
Most of these titles had small print runs and are now nearly out of print, but I have a few copies. Contact me for further details and prices.
Arachne Press has published some of my poems, notably in Vindication (2018) and The Other Side of Sleep (2014). Order from this link:
