Welcome to here...

*NEWS UPDATE*

There's a new book - "Faith" - coming from Shadowtrain in January 2009, or thereabouts.

I hate to write about myself, but here goes: I hope there is enough room.

I think my poems are sometimes acts of explicit design and at other times products of chance and a subconscious activity I rarely understand. More usually they come from somewhere between these polarities. When asked to explain my poems I usually resort to taking on a puzzled or pained expression, and say I can’t speak at the moment because I have to wash my hair. When I have to explain my poems because there is a gun at my head I admit they perhaps sum up my life, in part or in whole, which is either as it should be or very sad. And I have no idea if it’s true, to be honest. I don’t think about things like themes. Themes are for others to find, but if the poems are my life then that’s the theme, I suppose. Or one of them. If I understood it all I’d be very afraid, and I wouldn’t write poems.

 

   

But what of life outside poetry world? After ten highly amusing years working as a telephone operator, in 2005 I went to China to teach English to university students. In 2007 I returned to the UK to be the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Nottingham Trent University. Then, in 2008, I again fled the bald thugs and their women (sic) who have taken over our English cities’ market squares to hurl lovingly hand-crafted spit-soaked insults at passers-by of an evening, and returned to China, which is a long way away.

Please click here to read my Autobiography.