It’s my turn to present. Mrs Dover is in her usual position – lounging on a desk, elbows resting on her knees, hands clasped – she leans forward, ears primed for grammatical error. My arm shakes as I hold up my book. ‘This is one of my favourites,’ I utter, ‘Ariel, by Sylvia Plath’. Dover, Read More
Their keening need will fold its sound, bred in the humid shells they’ll make ‒ to shift, and free (peculiar as themselves) new birds. Jim Stewart, from “Oystercatchers” Before he died, Jim and I discussed the idea of having some kind of Memorial for him, based loosely around the poetics of the American Poet Joe Read More
Tickets for Dundee had been collected from passengers on the train before crossing the bridge. A photograph shows the tickets [of] some who lost their lives that night. The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography The Last Train from St Fort They have the stubs, some fifty-six Read More
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: Time is on the wing but he doesn’t seem to like it as he paces up and down the aisle worried about flying perhaps or deep thrombosis until a stewardess makes him take his seat again. My Read More
The car hire company bestows upon you the great gift of abandoning you to the airport overnight. Returned to the eternal striplights of your early travels, you wrap your head in the checkered pakama, place the green Ethiopian Airways eyemask on your face, and insert the orange earplugs which can’t quite block the music of Read More