from A BRIGHTNESS TO CAST SHADOWS (1980)
17 ‘As our bloods separate’
17 Birdsong
18 ‘Daffodils in vases’
18 ‘But most you are like’
18 A Brightness to Cast Shadows
19 The Fool
19 ‘Eyes wide with the moon’
20 ‘You are distant, you are already leaving’
20 ‘In the meantime, in the waiting time’
21 Eurydice
21 The Damned
22 ‘All wraiths in Hell are single’
23 Streams
24 Lamb
25 Near Zennor
26 The Lane
27 The Journey
28 ‘Pitiless wind’
28 ‘The wind has bared the stars’
29 ‘Trewernick’
30 ‘Suddenly she is radiant again’
31 ‘For years now’
32 Waiting
32 Hands
33 In Memoriam 8571 Private J.W. Gleave
38 Coltsfoot
38 Coltsfoot and Larches
38 Hyacinth
39 Johnny
39 Jimmy
40 Billy
40 Stuart
41 ‘But with a history of ECT’
41 ‘Dennis Jubb is dead’
42 ‘I suppose you know this isn’t a merry-go-round’
from WATCHING FOR DOLPHINS (1983)
45 Mary Magdalene and the Sun
46 Lazarus to Christ
46 Christ to Lazarus
47 Minos, Daedalos and Pasiphaë
48 Priapics
49 ‘Misshapen women’
50 The Door
50 ‘Pity the drunks’
51 Boy finds tramp dead
52 Elegy
53 Swans
54 Watching for Dolphins
55 Islands
60 Journey
62 Bluebells
62 Autumn Lady’s Tresses
63 Autumn Crocuses
63 Sunflowers
63 Tree in the Sun
64 Song of a Woman at the Year’s Turning
65 Atlantis
66 Chronicle
67 Sunium
68 Lasithi
68 The Diktaean Cave
69 A Relief of Pan
70 Perdita
71 Talitha Cumi
75 Love of the Dark
76 Moon
76 Red Figure Vase
from MADDER (1987)
78 Note
79 Adam confesses an infidelity to Eve
80 Orpheus
80 Siesta
81 Yseut
82 Ignis
82 Martyr
83 Oh, Jemima
84 Don’t jump off the roof, Dad
85 The Meeting of God and Michael Finnegan in South Park
86 Don Giovanni: Six Sonnets
89 Confessional
93 Thoughts of the Commandant of the Fortress of St Vaast-la-Hougue
90 Pillbox
91 Nestor encourages the troops
92 Garden with red-hot pokers and agapanthus
92 ‘Looking for nothing’
93 Sunset Shells
94 Oranges
95 Sols
100 Cold Night
100 ‘As though on a mountain’
101 At Dinas
102 Local Story
103 Mynydd Mawr
104 Swimmer
105 Butterfly
105 ‘Then comes this fool’
106 Mistress
106 ‘Wet lilac, drifts of hail’
107 Poplar
108 Apples
109 Pictures
109 Amber Seahorse
110 Eldon Hole
111 Sunken Cities
111 Landscape with friends
112 At Kirtlington Quarry
113 Tea-time
114 Burning
116 ‘We visit the house’
116 Mother and Daughter
117 The quick and the dead at Pompeii
118 Fogou
118 Christmas
119 Hyacinths
120 Mappa Mundi
from SELECTED POEMS (1991)
124 Local Historian
124 A two-seater privy over a stream
125 The Pitman’s Garden
126 The Vicar’s Firework Show
127 A calvary on the Somme
128 ‘He arrived, towing a crowd’
128 The Saint observed at his Vigil
129 Man on his holidays
130 Mandeville remembered
130 Mandeville
131 The Scaffolders
132 Clare leaves High Beach
133 ‘Under that bag of soot’
133 ‘There used to be forests’
134 The Forest
135 Miranda on the Tube
136 A blind elephant man in the underground
137 Jailed for Life
137 Quay
139 The Island of Curieuse
139 Lilith
139 ‘I should not be dreaming of you like this’
140 ‘In the ocean room’
141 Swimmer and Plum Tree
142 ‘I am inconsolable’
142 Emblem
CASPAR HAUSER: A Poem in Nine Cantos (1994)
145 Note
147 First Canto
155 Second Canto: Georg Friedrich Daumer, 1 January 1875
173 Third Canto: Clara Biberbach, 24 May 1852
182 Fourth Canto: Philip Henry Stanhope, 1 March 1855
195 Fifth Canto: Georg Friedrich Daumer, 1 January 1875
200 Sixth Canto: Philip Henry Stanhope, 1 March 1855
203 Seventh Canto: Georg Friedrich Daumer, 1 January 1875
206 Eighth Canto
212 Ninth Canto
SLEEPER (1995)
217 Sleeper
from THE PELT OF WASPS (1998)
231 Piers
231 Returns
232 The Mirror
232 The Apple Tree
233 Peacock
233 The Wasps
234 Musicians in the Underground
235 Angels
236 Poppies
237 Mistletoe
237 On Oxford Station, 15 February 1997
238 Ground Elder
239 ‘We say the dead depart’
240 Quaker Memorial Meeting
241 Bonfires
242 Above West Shore, Llandudno
243 Soldiering On
244 Kaluga
245 ‘Stuck fast’
246 ‘Eyeballs of quartz’
247 Lamb
248 Endangered Species
249 Warming
250 Athens
251 Master and Man
252 ‘Figures on the silver’
254 Kinder
255 Bombscare
256 Don Giovanni and the Women
257 A Meeting in the Library
258 Llyn Conach
259 Comfort me with Apples
259 ‘You make the rules’
260 Sleep With
261 ‘That place again’
262 Cycladic Idols
263 ‘All night the rain’
263 ‘The lakes, their stepping down’
264 ‘Mid-afternoon in another narrow bed’
265 Honey from Palaiochora
SOMETHING FOR THE GHOSTS (2002)
269 Nude
270 Something for the Ghosts
271 Dear Reader
272 The House
273 Sleepwalker
274 Man and Wife
275 On the Cliffs, Boscastle
276 Monologue, or The Five Lost Géricaults
280 Dramatis Personae
282 Mosaics in the Imperial Palace
283 Dominion
284 The Llandudno Town Band
285 Encouragements
286 Drunk Locked in Music Room Wrecks Grand
287 Catacombs, Paris
287 Town Centre
288 Mel
289 J
290 Legger
291 The Immortals of Landevennec
293 The Senator
294 The Grief Coming Out
295 The Porthleven Man
296 Room Facing Cythera
297 Shabbesgoy
298 The Hoist
298 Aphasia
299 Common and Particular
300 The Anemones
300 The Crem
301 House Clearance
302 Shoes in the Charity Shop
303 New Year Behind the Asylum
304 Ashes and Roses
305 Visiting
306 Fine Soil
306 Riddling the Strata
307 Shed
307 The Dark Room
308 Streets
310 Fields
312 Girls in the East
313 School Parties in the Museum
314 Jazz on the Charles Bridge
315 ‘Hölderlin’
316 Hallowe’en
318 Skylight over the Bed
319 Skylight over the Bath
320 Gorse
321 Fulmars
323 Orangery
A POETRY PRIMER (2004)
326 Pleasure
326 Simile
327 Metaphor
327 Metre and Rhythm
328 Form and Content
329 Res/Verba
330 Inventio (I)
330 Inventio (II & III)
331 Periphrasis
332 Poetry and Rhetoric (I)
332 Poetry and Rhetoric (II)
333 Personae (I)
333 Personae (II)
334 Orphic
334 Mnemosyne
NEW & UNCOLLECTED POEMS (2004)
337 Chapel of Rest
338 Before the Lidding
339 The One Left
340 Water
340 At the Time
341 Absence
342 ‘Go visiting, Memory…’
343 Teacher
343 Photo
344 Legend
346 Simile (‘Like when a peppercorn…’)
347 ‘More like today…’
348 Foxgloves
349 Asphodels, White Foxgloves, Red Foxgloves
350 Submerged Site
351 Wrecking
351 Northwesterly
352 Pisces Moon
353 Not Only But Also
354 ‘There is nothing I can tell you…’
355 Love Feast
355 Rowing
356 Phenomena
357 ‘So slim you are…’
357 Earrings in the Forest
358 Dreamer
358 Crossing
359 How It Is
359 Inquisitor and Sinner
360 At the Frost Fair
360 Lover
361 Epstein’s Lazarus
361 Porlock
362 The Second Mrs Hardy
363 Off Lerici
363 Keats at Lulworth
364 Under the Gunnery
364 Enclave
365 Treptow. Deserted Funfair
366 Corpse
367 Body Parts and the Rapture
367 Deer on the Street
368 Outlook
368 Remembrance Sunday
369 Stroke
370 On Conwy Mountain
371 Visiting
371 Estuarine
372 Cave Dale
373 Head of a Kore in a Marble Mine on Paros
373 Mother and Child
374 Trilobite in the Wenlock Shales
374 Obolus
