Kidland
“I am blown away by Kidland. It is extraordinary.”
Jay Griffiths
Dark Mountain
“It may be the most honest attempt at literature we’ve seen.”
Sharon Astyk
Real England
“A watershed study, a crucially important book.”
The Independent
One No, Many Yeses
“Part visionary, part historian: accessible, impassioned and persuasive.”
Esquire
Welcome to my website. In these dusty e-stacks you’ll find a selection of the best of my journalism and essays, my new blog, information about my books, some poetry, an invitation to climb the Dark Mountain, a calendar of events I’ll be appearing at soon, and plenty more. I hope you enjoy browsing.
Kidland, and other poems
Published in April 2011 by Salmon Poetry
‘I am blown away by Kidland. It is extraordinary, it has the texture of a lived and rightful anger; the delineation of vividness, the strangeness of the unknowable’ – Jay Griffiths
The poems in my first collection rise from ancient landscapes – from the moors of northern England to the sands of the Nevada desert – to confront a society in denial about its relationship with nature, memory and destiny.
Latest articles
Burns and Barnes: a tale of two Poets
Published in the Guardian, 25 January 2012
The differing fates of two dialect poets may tell us something about the differing priorities of England and Scotland.
This collapse is a 'crisis of Bigness'
Published in the Guardian, 26 September 2011
The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it
Upon the Mathematics of the Falling Away
Published in Dark Mountain issue 2, June 2011
Suicide is everywhere in this culture, under every stone, and once you come to be a part of that great, unspeaking clan of people who have been touched by it, you see this.
Set in Prociono and Linden Hill Italic, both by Barry Schwartz.
Designed and built by spanner on radiant.
