About me
A Mancunian by accident of birth, brought up first in the London suburbs and then in Gloucestershire, I’ve spent most of my working life in Scotland. Whether this rootlessness is a blessing or a curse is something I’ve never been able to fathom, but something that interests me is what gives people their sense of place and the different things that ‘home’ means to each of us.
For me now home means the village of Corrie on the Isle of Arran off the West coast of Scotland where I came to live with my wife Claire about ten years ago. For thirty years the demands of family life and work meant that my writing was confined to filling voluminous notebooks with jottings about whatever caught my eye. More recently, having decided that the world has more than enough novelists, I’ve been writing poetry. I like the way a good poem is a perfect distillation of words. And as well as the economy of the form I like the idea of trying to reflect in verse the essence of what is important about the life I have lived.
So for the past five years I have been trying to teach myself the craft of writing poems and have started to see some published in anthologies and journals. My first full collection, Time Lines, has recently been selected for publication by Cinnamon Press and is due out in July 2011.
This website is a way of sharing some of my work. I hope you enjoy the reading as much as I have enjoyed the writing.
