"when you see anything of mine that you don’t like remember that I’m sincere in doing it and that I’m working toward something." - Ernest Hemingway A selection of recent posts from my Substack site. If you like what you read, please subscribe on Substack for free! Thank you. "Writing until the light goes out" … Continue reading August and September’s Substack highlights
Category: Poetry
“Look We Have Coming to Dover”
Presumably it's not unreasonable to struggle with phonetically-written English if that's the tactic adopted to try and conjure a particular accent. Doing so doesn't make the work concerned 'bad' (nor automatically 'good'); neither does it make me a 'bad person'. (I assure you I try not to be!) But I did struggle with such poems … Continue reading “Look We Have Coming to Dover”
Climate Change – my opening piece from a recent reading…
https://videopress.com/v/UK4r2yaC?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true You may need to turn your volume up!
“The Seasons of Cullen Church”
I confess I couldn't get particularly excited about Bernard O'Donoghue's The Seasons of Cullen Church; in the main the poems felt a little insipid and insignificant, and the topics lacked a certain relevance (not being Irish, nor religious, nor knowing some of the people referenced). But they should still work for all of that. However, … Continue reading “The Seasons of Cullen Church”
Virtual poetry reading event on Thursday 27th.
The 38th in a long-running series of events. Details in the link below: https://coverstorybooks.com/2026/08/23/contextual-38-in-four-days/
“After Fame”
We're told by the cover flaps that Sam Riveire's After Fame is a collection of 118 poems based - in some way shape or form - on Book 1 by the Roman poet, Martial. Which on the face of it is fair enough. However a significant proportion of the 118 are clearly not poems but … Continue reading “After Fame”
IMPORTANT – FOR ALL INGRAM SPARK USERS
I have just discovered there is an opt-out to help prevent your books being sold to AI companies (which presumably means the default is ‘opt-in’…) You can find the opt-out link here (pass it on): https://www.ingramcontent.com/page/ai-opt-out
“House of Lords and Commons”
If I struggled with Ishion Hutchinson's House of Lords and Commons that was because all too often I felt the poems sacrificed meaning in order to be 'poetic'. Often too poetic. For a large chunks of time I had no idea what was being said, getting lost in over-long 'sentences' and the tricky syntax. I … Continue reading “House of Lords and Commons”
Reading this coming Friday!
“The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories”
I venture to suggest that The Melancholy Death and Oyster Boy and Other Stories (1997 in the US) was only published because Tim Burton was already famous. [Yes, the Tim Burton of 'Beetlejuice', 'Batman', 'Edward Scissorhands', 'Mars Attacks!' etc.] While the drawings are proficient, whacky and creepy, the writing isn't. Very few of the poems … Continue reading “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories”
