Poetry


My poems have appeared in bath magg, The RialtoFinished CreaturesShearsman MagazineVolume PoetryInk Sweat & Tears, and Anthropocene Poetry. In 2022, with composer Christopher Cook, I won the Rosamond Prize.

My work has appeared in the anthology Angled by the Flood: Poems about the Sea, edited by Elsa Hammond; and featured in Osmosis Press‘s ‘new writing’ series.

I teach life-writing and qualitative research methods at Oxford University, I am an Honorary Fellow of the Department of Education and of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing.

A poem for Ben about snow

bath magg

Open your eyes forget your arms

The venue flares with living light, a silent rave
of crystal jelly, swarms of filmy limbs each trailing

strobes of chemical excitement, frantic
glow-tips spark between ecstatic colonies of pulsing

bells, and brittle stars detach their arms, sensitive
to blue-green light that shimmers like a riot

and in the deepest parts they wait, transfixed,
for the web-cloaked vampire squid, spinning out the moment and

the throng is poised until the drop
releases them, a single palpitating heartbeat thrums

and radiates until their wonderland is visible from space,
its chiffon limits fading into the milky sea.

Angled by the Flood (2021)

Author’s Note

A poem found in Annie Dillard’s Mornings Like This.

I did not write a word of it. Other hands composed
the lines. Pawing through, they [held] and wave[ed]

aloft the element of broken text. I lifted them. Sometimes
I dropped the books themselves; and added original

intentions to a loose collection of torn and damaged
fragments. The baffling quality of spiritual knowledge

looks sober on the page. Consequently, I took
wild liberties, poetry’s oldest and most sincere aim.

Shearsman magazine 123 / 124