Here I’ll be posting occasional new poems, as and when they arrive.

‘The worrying rose’ is a poem inspired (or informed) by a sentence in Christopher Neve’s astonishing book about twentieth century British art, Unquiet Landscape. The sentence haunted me for a couple of years until the poem came along.

The worrying rose

(Just loss and winter, and the worrying rose - Christopher Neve)

I speak to the worrying rose:

here in the garden amid

hollyhocks and upright irises

what could be so terrible?

Darkness exists, winter exists

but here in the garden

there is nothing to hide

(say the hollyhocks and irises).

You worry me, rose.

In your golden rose-ness,

your gloaming glow,                                                                                    

what could be so wrong?

There are the eyes of stars

in the dark and there is

dust on the cold grass –

nothing very terrible or sad.

Just another drama in the garden

of your own making?

For unto us a gift is given.

Unto us is given a garden.

What if what lies at the heart

is only dust and loss?

Terrible and sad, but nothing

worse than terrible, sad.

The poem below is from a sequence called ‘Hermit Songs’ which explores ideas of female solitude and aloneness.

Her Blue Chair

What she would like is for no one

to know she is in the garden –

not the birds, not the leaves, not the children.

There is her blue chair in the shade of the plum tree.

If she sits for many afternoons

she will manage to disappear from her body,

which is not called hiding.

Her absence will shine like a bright new coin.

Birds will fly through her as through cloisters.

What she would like is for the garden

to forget her here and forget her everywhere.