I would add that John was a man with the biggest bullshit detector and aversion to empty flattery it was possible to have. He had a mischievous sense of humour, but would never use it to ‘punch down’. Politically, he was a generous humanitarian and socialist who was true to his principles in his every day actions. An intellectual colossus who could put his learning and knowledge into words anyone could understand. A champion of underdogs and swift disparager of bullies. I know that on one of his last visits to hospital, he told a horrible racist who had abused a nurse to fuck off. He had a brain faster than light with access to a massive library of literature and music and personal anecdotes and jokes. His love for his wife Pauline was clear for all to see. They had met as students at art college in the nineteen fifties . On one of the last occasions that we spoke on the phone, John shared something with me and added that when he had said the same thing to her she had told him ‘not to talk balls’.

As my editor, publisher and friend, he championed, supported and encouraged me, and always said what he thought. When it came to editing, he had a light touch, and I could always see straight away that his pencilled comments and suggestions and questions were going to benefit the poem. Above all, he was kind.

My thoughts are with John’s family and all the other people who knew him for many more years than I did. It seemed to me that John Lucas very much enjoyed being John Lucas. I take some solace from this.

When I heard John had died, I wrote the words below. I like to think he would have chuckled, but I can’t help wondering if he would have pencilled in a suggestion or two.

.Don’t feel you have to write me an elegy,

there are probably far too many
on the go already. I’d rather you told
a joke or raised a glass with friends.
Don’t feel you have to say anything
now, or share that stuff I said about
the use and misuse of a certain word,
mention our last conversation where
I briefly gave my reasons for loving
George Herbert, expressed a view
on what fame did to poor Chet Baker
or shared an anecdote about a poet
that had us both in stiches until
I brought things to a close with a brisk
right, good to hear from you, better go

Full Circle, by Peter Clayton

I have just pressed send and dispatched the final version of my new collection of poems. Light Work, to the printers. It will be published by Shoestring Press in November. I am very pleased to say that the above painting, by my friend and colleague the artist and teacher Peter Clayton, will be used for the cover.

As a reader of contemporary poetry, I always have a look at the acknowledgements page of any collection I am reading. I really enjoy seeing where poems have been published- the litany of magazine names- new, old, venerable, punky, defunct etc.

This morning. for example, I looked at the acknowledgements pages of Greta Stoddart’s ‘Fool’ (Bloodaxe, 2022) and David Morley’s ‘Passion’ (Carcanet 2025), two books that I have recently acquired.

When it comes to submitting poems to magazines, we all have our favourites.
UK institutions like The North and The Rialto are two of the places I am grateful to
for having published some of my poems over the 15 or so years since I began sending them out. Where to send is a matter for the individual poet – why send work to magazines whose contents don’t generally appeal?

Despite the limited number of poetry publishing outlets, there are magazines, both in print and online, I haven’t and probably wouldn’t submit to. Some, because I have never seen a copy, others because I don’t fancy their name, style or editorial content. There are one or two magazines and newspapers that I would not want to have work in due to longstanding political alignments that I disagree with.

Sometimes, partly due to intermittent impatience with the (often understandably) glacial pace of poetry magazine publishing, I will send some poems to a small online magazine or perhaps a blog where I know I will receive a swift response. Once or twice I have been asked for a poem by an editor, which is very nice.

Back to the new book. Light Work has been gathering itself since the last collection, ‘The Great Animator’, was published in 2017. I can’t quite fathom where the time has gone, but a book of poems takes as long as it takes, and, after a lot of redrafting, re-ordering, editing, culling and inserting poems, I have had to finally let it go.

Putting together the acknowledgements page, I thought it might be interesting to share where individual poems have previously appeared, so below is the contents page with places some of the poems were published. I have added links to some in case anyone would like to visit the poems and their online publications.

Not all the poems that were published in magazines are in this book. This is because they didn’t seem to fit with the rest, or because they didn’t seem to represent any version of me that I would now like to present, or because I didn’t love them enough, despite a magazine editor kindly printing them previously.

Of the fifteen poems that have ‘Unpublished’ next to them, nine have never been sent anywhere. The other six have gone out and been returned, bless them. I still believe in you guys.

It is traditional to write something like ‘I am grateful to the editors of the following magazines where some of these poems have previously appeared. ‘
Given the work involved in all aspects of running poetry magazines, however ‘great’
or small, I can say that I really am truly thankful to all the editors and any admin staff involved, as well as to you for reading this.

Contents

1. The Privilege – The Butchers Dog issue 20, Spring 2024
2. Dragonfly – Bad Lilies, issue 8, June 2022
3. This is the Day – Atrium, August 2024
4. Tony Hoagland is Looking at Me- The Rialto issue 95. 2021
5. Thank you for sharing your illusion – Chain link , Issue 1, 2025
6. Which Service?- Unpublished
7. Icarus’s Mother- Wild Court March 2021
8. Baby Grand- Anthropocene
9. The Geologist- Matt Riches’ blog, Wear The Fox Hat, 2025
10. Layby- The North, Issue 66, August 2021
11. Wake- The Manchester Review issue 22, 2019
12. Saved- Under the Radar, issue 31
13. The Nation’s Favourite Bird- The North issue 63, 2020
14. Referendum Morning – The Rialto, issue 92, Spring 2019
15. The White Doe – Atrium, Sep 2024
16. Feed- 14 Magazine, 2020
17. The Weight – Finished Creatures, 2020
18. If A Parrot – Unpublished
19. A Blue Vase- Unpublished
20. A Celebration- Atrium, Sept 2025
21. Tinnitus- Unpublished
22. Pines – Finished Creatures 2019
23. London Plane- Magma, 2015
24. Mowing- The North issue 63. 2020
25. Sonnet – Anthropocene
26. Mute Swan- Unpublished
27. Can’t Buy a Thrill- Unpublished
28. Onesie – The Butcher’s Dog, issue 13, Summer 2020
29. X – The Rialto, 2021
30. Hernia- The Manchester Review, 2019
31. Three Degrees of Separation- Unpublished
32. From An Illustrated Bible – 14 Magazine, issue 4, 2023.
33. The Adoration- The Rialto, 2021
34. Zulke Is Het Leven- The Butcher’s Dog 2019
35. Murder – Chain link, issue 1, 2025
36. Our Lady’s Convent- Unpublished
37. Fine Fare- Unpublished
38. When Someone Asks ‘How are you?’- Black Nore Review, 2025
39. Absolute Beginners – New Welsh Review, 2021
40. Rain – First published in ‘After Montale’ ,Shoestring Press 2019
41. The Plumtree- The High Window, 2024
42. Trespass- The Black Nore Review, 2025
43. Family Photograph in a Churchyard – The High Window
44. Come As You Are – Under The Radar issue 31
45. A Fire – The North, issue 72, 2025
46. Jamie Vardy Scores – Longlisted for National Poetry Comp 2021
47. Lilac – Finished Creatures, 2019
48. Poem In November – The High Window, 2021
49. The Lull- The North, issue 71 2025
50. Three Thousand Trees- Unpublished
51. Frappuccino- Unpublished
52. Untitled – Unpublished
53. Litany – Unpublished
54. A Crow- Unpublished
55. Attachment Theory – STRIX, 2022
56. Above the Quarry at solstice – The High Window,2019
57. St. Bridgid’s Day- Unpublished
58. Pipistrel – Unpublished
59. Windhover -14 magazine, 2025
60. Lightwork – The High Window 2021
61. Olaus and the Swallows – Wild Court, 2021
62. Definition – Chain Link issue 1, 2025
63. US Inauguration Day- Black Iris, 2025
64. Moth- Unpublished
65. A Call- Unpublished

Nottingham poet Neil Fulwood contacted me recently to ask if I could contribute to a new online magazine called Chain link. I love being asked to have poems considered for new projects, and so I was happy to supply three unpublished poems from the new book, which you can read by clicking this link.

I was also asked by the online magazine The Friday Poem to update an article I wrote about putting a poetry pamphlet together. You can read it here

Hello, I hope you are well?

I have a new book almost ready to go.

It is called ‘Lightwork’, and includes some of the poems I have written since
2017. This seems like quite a time span, given that my previous collections
‘The Sun Bathers’ and ‘The Great Animator’ came out within 3 years of each other.

I was fortunate to have a slim book of translations published in 2019, but this new book of poems will have been eight years in the making. For someone previously used to writing and editing quickly, this really surprises me.

I suppose there are several reasons for the slow-down, one being that I haven’t been in a hurry. I became very interested in the benefits of meditation, and also rediscovered the joy of other creative outlets, such as playing music and making paintings. I’ve also been busy enjoying my job, my family, my friends.

At one stage, I think I lost the motivation to get a book together, and despite having enough material that I liked, was even thinking of not taking up the kind offer to publish. I wondered if the world needed another book from me; would anyone be interested, was it any good? During a concentrated period of reflection, I had deep philosophical conversations with myself as I worried about the role of my poems as ego gratifying vehicles. Then I stopped worrying and overthinking.

Over the years, publication of poems in magazines such as The Butcher’s Dog and Bad Lilies, as well as feedback from people who said they enjoyed reading the poems, has helped me believe it was worthwhile to collect them into a book.

Twice, in recent years, I entered selections of the 25 or so poems I thought worked together into pamphlet competitions, and on both occasions they were shortlisted (once by Magma magazine and once by the Poetry Business. ) This was encouraging, although, while I am grateful for external validation, I have found that my own valuation of my poems is most important, and this does tend to fluctuate.

My son has said he will read the new collection, so maybe that is reason enough.

Looking through the poems this evening, I realise they make up an album that reflects my experiences and concerns over the period of time they were written.
They hold experiences and reflections that I could not communicate or preserve in any other way.
I still love writing, and trying to make poems as well as I can, and am grateful to still have a publisher who produces high quality books, despite the inevitably small audience.

I think that over familiarity can nullify appreciation of our own poems, so I was pleased and presently surprised to be moved by some of the work in my read- through this evening, as well as enjoying some of the music of the poems. A lot of hours went into this book!

I could continue to work on some of the poems forever (there must have been several hundred drafts of some, published and unpublished), so it will be good to get them between covers where they can’t wriggle and skid and dance about on the screen or page anymore. Variations in line breaks/ stanza shapes, punctuation, not to mention content, continue to present themselves every time I open the word document of ‘Lightwork’ . There is also the matter of sequencing or ordering, with potential conversations and connections between poems cropping up all over the place. It has to stop somewhere!


I am very grateful to everyone who has read anything I have written and shared. A poem is only alive when it is read or heard.

I still have to finalise the contents and decide on a cover, but all being well there should be a book for sale in the spring . I am quite forgetful, so I will end with a note to self to remind me of my intention to donate any profit from books bought directly from me to the charity War Child.

Thanks.

When I started reading contemporary poetry in my 30’s, about 25 years ago, one of the first books I picked up was John Burnside’s
‘Swimming in the Flood’ . Poems like the one below, from that collection,
blew my mind.

What was this magic trick performed by means of line length and enjambment, this seemingly effortless mastery of white space? Who knew a living poet could write so rhythmically and fluidly? There was pain in the poem too, a shadow, barely there, but powerfully present. And a sense of redemption in those words that I would come to recognise as central to Burnside’s concerns- ‘grace and attunement’ .

I didn’t follow up by buying all Burnside’s subsequent collections. Dipping into them, they sometimes seemed uneven. There was a repetitiveness in their themes that I didn’t appreciate at the time, but later came to see as a strength, and an inevitable consequence of Burnside’s ongoing exploration of his preoccupations.

I did love individual poems, like Peregrines.

Peregrines

Soon they will kill the falcons that breed in the quarry,
(it’s only a matter of time: raptors need space
and, in these parts, space equals money);

but now, for a season, they fly low over the fields
and the thin paths that run to the woods
at Gillingshill,

the children calling out on Sunday walks
to stop and look
                              and all of us
pausing to turn in our tracks while the mortgaged land

falls silent for miles around, the village below us
empty and grey as the vault where its money sleeps,
and the moment so close to sweet, while we stand and wait

for the flicker of sky in our bones
that is almost flight.

I found his 2019 book ‘The Music of Time’ a fascinating and enlightening read,
in that it brilliantly articulated and chimed with some of my own half-formulated thoughts. Described as ‘an urgent defence of the power of poetry’, it is more a collection of essays than a unified academic tome. In it, Burnside discusses poems and ideas of poetry as they inform not just ‘the life of the mind’ but also my day-to-day existence.” Although Burnside was incredibly knowledgeable in his areas of interest, there is a humility to his writing, a careful avoidance of the preachiness, duality and self aggrandising statements of opinion that I find alienating.

I think, in recent years, my own self-development, my world view, and ideas about what is important, seem to be reflected in Burnside’s work, particularly in his last collection, Ruin Blossom, which has been on my desk since I bought it a month or so ago. It might be his best collection, and I am glad that after serious illness, he lived to see it published. I have always been drawn to ideas of transcendence, loss or absorption of self into something much greater that contains us all, and, who knows, maybe some of this was instilled during brief tenure as an infant in a convent school. I’m not talking about conventional religiosity or belief of any particular kind, just that some of the Burnside’s language of wonder, discovery, transience, and openness to experience of the natural world, resonates deeply with me. Beyond an appreciation of the incredible power of his best poems, he is probably the only poet that I feel a deep affinity of world view with, not least in his attitude to death. I probably can’t explain this plainly here, and maybe I don’t feel the need to. Here is his poem ‘Afterlife’ , which I am sure will be widely shared on this, the day after his death was publicly announced .


When we are gone
our lives will continue without us

– or so we believe and,
at times, we have tried to imagine

the gaps we will leave being filled
with the brilliance of others:

someone else gathering plums
from this tree in the garden,

someone else thinking this thought
in a room filled with stars

and coming to no conclusion
other than this –

this bungled joy, this inarticulate
conviction that the future cannot come

without the grace
of setting things aside,

of giving up
the phantom of a soul

that only seemed to be
while it was passing.

You can read this poem and some notes Burnside made about it here ,
including the following paragraphs.

‘I am beginning to gloss too much the actual poem and that is something to avoid. Of course, a poet wants to present his or her poem as a room into which a reader can wander, in which they can look out of the window, pick up the ornaments and knick-knacks, look at the pictures on the wall and make themselves at home. In a sense, one could say that the poem is, in this respect, the afterlife of the poet, as he or she was in the making of the poem.

I would say, however, without further exegesis, that this is a poem that I find immensely affirmative – an affirmation of the place death plays in the continuation of life (with a big L, if you like). One might say that transient, individual examples of life die so that the larger story can continue – and in my view that is as much of an afterlife as I would wish for, or could need.’

Burnside expressed a politics beyond traditional groupings, one that is deeply humanist and also deeply ‘spiritual’, for want of another word. His ecological concerns seem rooted in an understanding of the interconnectedness of all living beings. He was highly intellectual, and very down to earth.

“I want to venture a hypothesis that, roughly expressed, goes like this: you cannot learn to love yourself until you find something in the world to love; no matter what it is. A dog, a garden, a tree,a flight of birds, a friend…Because what we love in ourselves is ourselves loving.”
John Burnside


You can read a selection of Burnside’s articles from his time as New Statesman nature columnist here.


I met John once, at the Aldeburgh poetry festival. It was the day the poet Kim Addonizio performed a poem that I think was called ‘Penis Blues’. Kim asked for male three or four male members of the audience to join her in performing her poem. I ventured down to the stage with three other chaps. Kim explained we were to be a chorus of penises, standing behind her as she read and, at her signal, augmenting the poem by, at various points, swaying together or dancing.
The audience in the large theatre was in fits of laughter.

Later that evening, after John Burnside’s reading, I went up to say hello and tell him I was a fan. I remember giving John a copy of my book as a gift, which he graciously accepted. He looked at me for a moment before exclaiming in delighted recognition, ‘You’re one of the penises!’ I said I had been, but that I hoped not to be remembered as such. We laughed.

Below is my new translation of a poem the contemporary Italian poet Andrea Inglese. I have translated this poem before, about ten years ago and it was published (together with another Inglese poem) in Litter magazine. I think it is a wonderful poem, and revisited it this morning on Poetry International , where you can find more of Inglese’s work, and a translation of this poem by Gabriele Poole.
I was never quiet satisfied with my previous translation, so have had another go.

We Two

don’t need dreams, rituals, ceremonies,
accompanying strings, we don’t need
veneer, stucco, porcelain;
the whorls of our fingertips are clear,
the shell of my ear, grazed
by your hand or tongue tip
sends blood rushing everywhere.
The role of the breath, of hands,
of saliva, are clear, the cascade
of blood through our organs
is clear, the shadows that pass
in our gaze, manifest, the surfaces
and depths of our vessels, their tunnels
and pleats, tint of our fabric,
folds and linings of our flesh. On this altar
cries and fevered whispers,
escaping our lips, are sacraments.
Here, all the gods are stunned
to silence, learning from us, spasm
by spasm, of the earth’s nourishments.

Noi due assieme non abbiamo bisogno
di sogni, né di saghe, leggende, riti,
strumenti ad arco, non abbiamo
bisogno di smalti, stucchi, porcellane,
è nitido il motivo a spirale
dei nostri polpastrelli, il foro
uditivo sormontato da una conchiglia
di carne, che sfiorata con mani
o punta di lingua irradia
ovunque la febbre, il tremore,
il precipizio del sangue, è limpido,
abbagliante il senso dei nostri
organi, è chiaro l’uso del fiato,
della saliva, del dito, delle ombre
che passano nello sguardo, è sicura,
sedativa la profondità dei varchi,
delle gallerie, delle pieghe, è buona
la superficie, la punta, la tinta
dei risvolti, la stoffa e la fodera
delle carni. Su questo altare
la bibbia sono le nostre parole
roche, sfuggite per sbaglio, le nenie
dementi. Qui le divinità, tutte,
tacciono, si spengono attònite,
imparano da noi, spasmo per spasmo,
i nutrimenti terrestri.

© 2001, Andrea Inglese
From: Inventari
Publisher: Editrice Zona

i.m Cleo, June 4th 2017- December 13th 2023

The little salt and pepper dog
might as well have my heart
tethered to her tail.

We print a blank field,
climb iced steps
until I can see clear distance

between what I thought
I needed, and what it seems
it might be. Below us,

railway sleepers rise
in thawing snow
like black keys on a piano.

She trots across an orange sun
that is leaving us behind.

First published in The High Window,