Poet, Critic & Journalist

That moment when the rituals of love turn into chores: the whispered calls from work desks, the secret codes on home phones, those stolen afternoons of dazed delirium out on that bed, that long-promised weekend far away from everyone – all now seem somehow more difficult to manage, and in their place are tiresome problems […]

And then the snow. We ran inside. You cried, as I recall, the tears lingering longer than the snow that streaked its sobs across the window-pane. The fire laughed, then we laughed, too, until laughter and tears mingled, setting us free to doubt which was which. We groped into the dark as the flames darted […]

(for Steve) Here in Sardinia on a brief junket, I soak up the sun, and listen to a woman who tells of a love that came undone, and there in a golf club (another brief junket) somewhere in Sligo, you sweat in a sauna on the morning after a long night before until life says […]

That’s what you said, and I did. The quaint mole up where the thigh met the drenched tangle of hair, the sheen of soft fuzz in the curve of her lower back, the musky smell as I bowed into her secret self, these were all much to my liking; also the way she’d crouch over […]

Lost to the world on this finger of land that claws its way into the open sea, a village sleeps in the midday heat. It has been slumbering here a long time, a clutch of houses convulsed by age and a century’s slow drift to elsewhere. Children grew up in this place, their kingdom the […]

(for Helen) There was nothing strange about that overnight stop in Singleton, New South Wales, a wagon-train ride from Sydney, where you and Warren welcomed two pilgrims from the far country, except it was a one-horse town no-one had heard of, and except, after a night of drenching rain, the street was parched as Laramie, […]

Everyone says you’re the perfect couple. The rest of us get by after a fashion, muddling through marriages not made in heaven, each day unmade by an unkind gesture, slighting children, and lies that bind into the years that yawn ahead. But yours was the one that worked, and still reproaches us for all we’re […]

Love’s energy spent, the room assumes a new texture. Come to the window, look, it is raining. Five starlings crystallise the lawn, wet plumage on fire. Rising, they wheel, blurs of insolence, towards the trees. A rainbow frames the sky, streaked with gold and all the colours you could name, my love. Stars emerge. How […]

At last we slept, and in the morning rose to clear the debris. I licked my wounds. It’s just we love not wisely but too well, you pleaded, and recalled that afterwards we sought redemption, framed by the fire inside a kindly room. We purged our guilt, you said. I almost screamed. I never wanted […]