Unlike most of my poems this one is pure autobiography: my mother really did throw the glass over her shoulder and, at the time anyway, she really didn’t care. Download pdf / Father’s wine had its own lexicon of awfulness: mousy, ropy, goaty… his proud but uncontested claim: you can make wine from anything. And [...]

This is the title poem from my collection ‘Time Lines’. It is about the fragility of memory, how even the most intense experiences fade, even the most familiar things slip away from us. What we recall later can never be more than an echo, fainter and fainter, of what actually happened. Download pdf / Don’t [...]

Those nights when sleep leaves you stranded, a sand-bound hulk on the bed of a long gone sea. Heavy-lidded, flannel-headed, straining for familiar sounds, a scutter of rain, the riffle of wind. Outside, over Cumbrae distant house lights blink and tremble, dance through drifting veils. Inside a silent presence of machines, garnet in the dark, [...]

A bit of a riddle perhaps, but I’d like to think that if you’d ever come across one of these you’d spot what I’m on about. Download pdf / Crouched in its corner at the elbow of the joists, huddled under their bare wood, it is as big as a human head and, for all [...]

they must have dragged themselves along dark channels rutting mud their swollen bodies carving grooves through cool ooze. Leathered skin forced apart tight marsh grasses and clumps of fern to find high jinks and kerfuffle under the moonless sky, the slop and tickle of pond-play in a thick broth of spring slime where lovers were [...]

This sonnet was the first of my poems to be published Any of you with grown-up children will probably find the bitter-sweet sentiments familiar. When You Were Born When you were born bells peeled, klaxons sounded and choirs sang hallelujahs in my head. I cradled you and marvelled. Surrounded by wonders I slept soundly in [...]

This is another sonnet. It was runner-up in last year’s poetry competition organised by Ragged Raven Press. Thin Ice The Inuit word is sikuaq, ice so thin you cannot trust it, for dangers skulk in its growing and dying, its slow flow and ebb of strength, the life within its bulk. The secret is to [...]

I wrote this poem while visiting Harris last year. On the island of Scalpay off the east coast of Harris there is a lighthouse called Eilean Glas. It is automated now but you can still see the abandoned house and outbuildings and imagine how it would have been when it was looked after by a [...]

The ‘mackerel pit’ is real, a nose in the sea floor off Corrie where fish gather and, if you can find it, the fishing is easy. Or was. Because of course the days when the waters around Arran were teeming with fish have ‘long gone’. The Clyde is, as they say, fished out. So this [...]