Over the Hills and Further Away
Over the Mountains an album for children by Ceilidh-Jo Rowe and Matthias Weston If your children aren’t already completely succoured and suckered by the colder excesses of pop culture, here is a...
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Shameless Plug #1
Michael and Adam Horovitz at Broadway Books, Hackney, on February 17th 2012 Welcome to the first shameless plug of 2012. I’m looking forward to this gig – it’s taking place a few days after what would...
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Rowlestone Revisited
This is the catalogue for an exhibition of landscape photographs taken in Wales and Cumbria by Oswald Jones, exhibited in Canterbury Cathedral in 1982, which features poems by Frances Horovitz and...
View ArticleOf Mice and Memories
Things are changing. A year lost to sorrow recedes into the distance and I am cleaning up and clearing out the house I grew up in. This will be a summer of stepping back and moving on. There is a great...
View ArticleClerihew on Seamus Heaney’s ‘Digging’
Seamus Heaney coaxed a genie from a simple spade. He had it made.
View ArticleFinding my way to the Hawthornden Fellowship
Just over two weeks ago, I set up a fundraising campaign with the strangely named but excellent Sponsume to try and help buy myself time at the Hawthornden Fellowship. It offers limited edition poster...
View ArticleThere was a young actress from Woolwich
Live Canon put out a call for Limericks about Woolwich on Twitter, claiming they couldn’t find any. Here’s my response in full – it was broken up over two tweets on Twitter, which is never a good look...
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Poetry for Pussy Riot
Just received word that my poem The Blackbird, which I contributed as part of the Poets for Pussy Riot project, has gone live on the English PEN website – you can find it, along with an ever-increasing...
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At Hawthornden
I have been resident at the Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland for the last month. Whilst there, I began to write prose for a blog, but this is the only part of it that ended up as a vaguely sustained...
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The Book: A Celebration
There’s a marvellous little festival happening in Stroud at the moment, a celebration of all things papery and information-packed, organised by Dennis Gould, printer of sublimely anarchic letterpress...
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Flying the Cage
Ah, gigs! This is the way to see in the New Year, especially after a feverish, bed-bound Christmas. Busyness and travel, microphones and friends old and new, new sights and sounds. If you’re in or...
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Whisper and Shout
How disappointing to read yet another ‘Poetry is Dead’ article, this time in The Independent, another round of gratuitous violence in the Punch and Judy show that is the mainstream media’s default...
View ArticlePancakes, Plath and an Agnostic Villanelle
Last thing at night last night, I looked at Twitter. A foolish thing to do for anyone needing sleep as much as I do right now, but sometimes foolishness pays dividends. I saw a tweet there from Live...
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100 Years of George Barker
I’m really delighted to have been asked at the last minute to take part in the centenary celebration of George Barker’s birth this coming Tuesday at Star Anise Arts Café in Stroud, alongside Barker’s...
View ArticlePoems, Pints and Playboys
Excited about tomorrow’s George Barker centenary reading I may be, but that’s only a poetry thrill. The reading I’m doing tonight, for Poems and Pints at the Queen’s Hotel in Carmarthen, combines the...
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Michael Horovitz’s Nocturnal Commune at the Albert Hall
For much of my life I’ve watched people unused to my father’s approach to poetry and music look on in fury, delight or bewilderment when he gets up on stage. Sometimes these three reactions are fused...
View ArticleNaPoWriMo Day One: Deer, Fret and Endless Cups of Tea
A couple of weeks ago, I got a nudge on Facebook from the poet Carrie Etter, suggesting that I might like to get involved with National Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo if you want to make it sound...
View ArticleNaPoWriMo Day Two: Poems, Over-Confidence and Axes
Day two of NaPoWriMo and I am still writing. Again the results have been consigned to a drawer for further contemplation, but again it is something I am content to call a poem, for the moment at least....
View ArticleA poem, or a draft of one at least
What is religion? Little more than a shared dream of landscape fenced with simple rules by which to live a life of listening for the quivering fire-voice of hope; some spark of kindness in the desert’s...
View ArticleThey’re Inviting Poets to Buckingham Palace
A little light satire* after A.A. Milne, written whilst watching with interest a certain amount of huffing and puffing from sections of the poetry community on the Internet about whether or not one...
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