A scheming prince who in another time / Would almost certainly have found a place / In Oxford's laddish club for toffs, the crime / He'd once concealed, filed as an unsolved case, / En route through London's thronging streets / Noisy with feigned or unfeigned acclamation, / Hopes to negate a usurping father's feats /... Read more

You are not the first or only one / To denigrate yourself, in such a way. / Nor is it necessary to speculate upon / The reason why such deprecations are / Not uncommon. / All that your ancient lover needs / To do is reassure you that our love endures / And that he's fortunate... Read more

1: The rounded belly brings to light its fruit / That bawls in protest at its sundering from / The fleshy comfort of the womb. / A mother's breast is the first and foremost / There, although a bottle with its powdered / Liquid more than merely helps to satisfy / The childish wish to stay... Read more

Within the slightly curled up flesh and bone / Your mind rejects your man's attempt to lead / You back to our first loving dawn. / I sit upon the bed and gaze and gaze upon / Your lovely face and golden hair and stop / Myself from clasping you as in the days long gone:... Read more

My loved one's been in exile far too long; / Out of sight, but never out of mind. / And though this next step moves her near, / She's still confined away from me and home. / This parted couple wish the final step / Will quickly come to bring us back to where / We... Read more

This forced unwanted separation tests / And strengthens what we promised all those years / Ago. Although we find it hard to bear / Your move to a ward beyond an easy reach / We hope it may restore you to yourself. / Meanwhile we trust the doctors may yet find / An efficacious medication that... Read more

1: "Come on the Pool," I'd shout at home games / On Bloomfield Road, much to my dad's chagrin. / "You were born in Preston. You should support / North End not Blackpool." / 2: From our upstairs window near the Irish Sea / On rare clear days we'd see in muted grey / And green... Read more

To make this day mean more than just / An idle ritual we need to think / About our son, a man of worth. / Wise in the world's ways his diligence / Brought him success, but best of all he cares / And shows his love for her who gave / Him so much care... Read more

EDGAR: Who is't can say 'I am at the worst?' / I am worse than e'er I was. / Shakespeare (King Lear) And yes these words will not for long hold sway / As Edgar lives to see their contradiction: / His father blinded, brought to 'smell his way / To Dover.' Nor has any interdiction... Read more

After an oceanic voyage once ashore / The earth may seem to slip away / If only for a moment. Soon the core / Of balance reasserts its easy sway. / In the fifties in my uni we / Would hold a yearly do to amuse / The faculty with filthy jokes and off key /... Read more

1: A single road driver yesterday / Began to nose out on to our highway, / Causing us to swerve and so precipitate / A three-car pile-up. / That lousy driver would have been OK / In nineteen fifties France where I soon learned, / A few miles from the ferry, traffic entering / From the... Read more

At seven years old the boy was sent to lodge / With a childless family of a sect unknown / To him. There was no way for him to dodge / The strictures of the tribe: he must disown / The cheery current song, the Lambeth Walk, / And sing but hymns upon the good Lord's... Read more

1: Let's not forget that ugly rumpus stirred / Up by Crowell's lot in England (not to speak / Of Wales or Scotland, Ireland, Germany / Or France) nor all that killing one another / On religious, or maybe economic grounds? / 2: Three centuries beyond that most uncivil strife, / A puritanical stepmother bound /... Read more

1: What does a brickie need to get the wall / Exactly right? Besides well-fired bricks / And rudimentary training in the tricks / Of the trade, a clear eye and a steady hand. / And what of last century's mill-bound weavers? / Cotton from east and west and hills of coal / To power looms;... Read more

I know what some of you are thinking: / 'Another liberal with his plea / For smoking bloody pot to be / Decriminalised.' / But you'd be wrong. For stumbling through / My hoard of words I sometimes think / Of meanings that may interlink / With origins now nullified. / Long ago in Latin class... Read more

1: Minimal hair loss, classically white, / Afflicted with matutinal shakes / And condemned to meditate at night / On death. Sleepless and afraid, he takes / A pill prescribed to shoo away anxiety, / And turns to memory in the hope to kill / The thoughts of nothingness to come, / Which only brings him... Read more

It's not the first time Britain's sent / Unwanted entities to this far continent. / Even before that fabled year of 1620, / The Brits had tried with scant success / To see if they might profit and so steer / Themselves to credal realms of progress. / The myth would have us think that native... Read more

1: For the structured life — by school and work / Or family obligation — passing time / Is not a pressing issue, nor for those / Devoted to a conjured holy cause. / A life alone my satisfy both saints / And sinners, even those especial blokes / Who frequent country pubs to sit alone... Read more

Babylon, the Persians and the Medes: / A writing in hand invokes a king's downfall / In a mysterious script. / Long lost centuries beyond that fabled feast, / Sterile hospital walls disturb a woman's / Equilibrium, / Although the undermining of her mind / Predates the fort's collapse that led to this / Benign captivity... Read more

The last day of Novermber's brought slight snow / That does not coat our world nor will not last. / Last night again our chat began to flow / Towards the doings of my distant past. / Your questions led me to remembered joy / Of visits to Kirkham's co-op cinema. / The first film that... Read more

Cattle no longer graze the fields that spanned / Two north-western English Villages / Lush grass kept green by the unfailing rain / Gave place to concrete of a runway planned / To take the planes built in the USA. / A few yards down our lane, a field gate / Beneath the flight path of... Read more

The single and peculiar life is bound / With all the strength and armour of the mind / To keep itself from noyance. / Shakespeare (Hamlet) Anyone who is a dissident / Undoubtedly would give assent / To this injunction so self-evident, / Even though it lacks a supplement: / That what is done should be... Read more

After his wife's death, he would disparage / The urging of his friends to send his pair / Of lads into the local orphanage, / For he meant well. / He even went to Ireland where he'd met / A lass he'd rather fancied in the war; / Perhaps she'd take him on. No go that... Read more

Doddering through the outskirts of a seat / Of learning, the old codger is bemused. / These buildings and redoubts of burnished brick / Are not congruent with his imagining / Of sandstone that is more than just a trick / Of memory. This he has culled from years / Of visiting the place. / And... Read more

You staged your death some thirty years away / From here; returning now you're forcing me / To compensate for my refusal to see / Your corpse on your Welsh funeral day. / Haunted by what you did I have to try / To recreate your body hanging in / That empty room and wonder if... Read more

Being Born: All humans, be they girls or boys, are born / To move. For months they will not see the light, / But they'll insinuate a feeling presence / Before they darkly wriggle into sight. / Leaving the dubious shelter of the womb, / Even perhaps before the cord's been sundered / The wailing child... Read more

A visit to my northern land / Is incomplete without / A call at Lytham’s lifeboat post / For a shopping bout: / A ball point pen, a greeting card / A towel or flashlight / With images emblazoned that bring / Other scenes in sight. / Such as a classroom print of brave / Grace... Read more

Prelude: Et in Arcadia ego Arcady and Eden, gardens sensed / As sites of primal innocence / Before experience / Has worked its worse: / Such myths raise questions that undermine / The rural idyll by reminding / Us as Vergil did / Of our mortality. / The Fylde: On the bus from Barcelona somewhere /... Read more

Written in blank verse, sonnet, ballad stanza and terza rima (among others), this collection of formalist poetry spans John’s six chapbooks and other selections of published and unpublished poems. “What especially strikes me about [John's poems] is the way that they virtually all start with something very specific - a landscape, a memory, an anecdote -... Read more

Three photographs taken sometime in the mid thirties of the last century plus another one taken in the early years of this century testify to the lifelong relationship I have had with my dear cousin Robert. Two of the early photographs show the two of us playing in the sand by the sea at Fleetwood. In... Read more

Scholarship boys speaking the dialect, / But learning subconsciously modified vowels, / Yet never quite mastering their betters’ RP, / Were humbled and felt it deep in the bowels / While striving to hang on to selfhood — DV, / Yet subtly acquiring a passable idiolect. / e.g. / Clogger Clegg’s son trying to concentrate /... Read more

Introduction: I came to Indiana for the first time with my wife Leslie and my three year old son Ben in the second week of March 1991 to buy a house, after Leslie had accepted a job to teach French at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville. Subsequently, I wrote a poem that is both... Read more

Although, in common with just about every teacher since the Second World War trained in England and Wales, I was examined in the philosophy of education, I cannot claim to have been influenced by Rousseau, Spenser, Dewey or Montessori – at least as far as I can tell. As for educational psychology, I developed a healthy... Read more

Amateur Theatricals: The Producer Contemplates the Marriageable Ophelia / Diego Cuchulain at Matalascañas / Museo del Prado: Sala XLV: Reagan is Elected for a Second Term / Orpheus Meets Lot's Wife / Martha as Man / Jack and Margery Daw / Bangers and Mash / Jours Impairs / Transformational Grammar / After Mothers' Day / Landfall... Read more

Starting from Here / Sketch for L.S. Lowry / A Babble of Green Fields / Plane Spotting / Joint Inheritance / Map Reading / Read more