Insult to Injury – Simon Armitage’s The Not Dead
An officer, fresh from Helmand, played us the mobile phone footage: the excited chatter and the puny rifle cracks were alien …
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The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering – Olivia Byard’s Strange Horses
When I took my wife’s call, I thought she was trapped in the wreckage of a car. Her brain was …
No Gypsy Wedding – David Morley’s The Invisible Kings
Donkeys were still hitched to lamp-posts in County Limerick in the ’80s and our village was the sort of place …
Kissing a Saint’s Stomach Lining – Adam Thorpe’s Voluntary
The strangest thing I’ve kissed is a section of stomach lining belonging to the Blessed Ralph Sherwin. He’s an old …
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Matthew Stewart’s Inventing Truth
In the family album there’s a snap of a tiny boy pressing his gift of a Matchbox car into the …
Looking at the emperor’s new clothes – Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry
Buy On Poetry from Oberon Books A school friend grasped counterpoint intuitively and had a penchant for writing fugues. He …
Ecce Homo – Julia Copus’ The World’s Two Smallest Humans
Buy The World’s Two Smallest Humans from Faber When I saw Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo (1999) dwarfed by Trafalgar Square’s scale and chutzpah, …
The Nightmare of History – Paul Durcan’s The Laughter of Mothers
Buy The Laughter of Mothers from Harvill Secker As the car turned off Bachelors Walk and onto O’Connell Street, my …
Lingerie in London – Me and the Dead by Katy Evans-Bush
Buy Me and the Dead from Salt To live on a narrowboat is to live in a world of either …
The trouble with poetry – how we get teaching it wrong
‘Would anyone care to join me / in flicking a few pebbles in the direction / of teachers who are …
Poor Rude Lines 