Buffer Zones Walkers walk by eyeing my cold coffee as if to ask what do you think of the lyric inventions of the seventeenth century but I don’t think about the seventeenth century, I am distracted by the train whistle and the road construction in the …

Otherness “I am in exile. Like everybody else, I live in a world that is given to me . . . it is not my native home.” —Paul Goodman, “Speaking and Language,” Defence of Poetry, 1971 A woman I know well has stolen my face. She answers for me w …

In 2001, Sophie Mayer and John McCullough read together in the Cella at the fabulous Sanctuary café in Brighton, brought together by poet Leo Mellor. Fast forward ten years to the present and happenstance sees both poets launching new books from Salt t …

Death by Lightning I left you in the house, your eyes on me, suffering from a relative of grief, took myself from here to the neighbouring village. I don’t usually walk, preferring donkey or moped, but neither could fare in the weather: rain slopped fr …

Threshold Clouds Up a curving road             on a dry gold hill,             you follow at thirty paces. Sometimes I look back and …