poems in print

Travellers and Avatars was shortlisted for the Live Canon First Collection Prize.

Its fifty-two poems and prose pieces take the reader on a journey from a launderette in Lancashire to outer space; from the hard shoulder of the M6 all the way to a post-apocalyptic future where sailors rediscover a sunken Florida. The final prose sequence, ‘Worlds’, recounts the voyage of a starship that may be a dream, a hallucination, or the story of a troubled marriage in modern Britain.

Travellers and Avatars can be ordered from Live Canon or from Amazon.

Rain Dancers in the Data Cloud won an Iota Shots Award and is published by Templar Poetry.

Its sixteen poems range all over the world, from a building site in Lancashire to a bell tower in Florence, a hotel in Beijing, an apartment block in Barcelona and a virtual realm where everyone is their own avatar. All the narrators, from a Native American storyteller to an anti-capitalist bombmaker, tell their stories amid the contemporary world where ancient cultures and belief systems clash with a faceless but ever-shifting hive mind of disembodied data.

The pamphlet can be ordered from Templar Poetry.

Source Code won the Ravenglass Poetry Prize.

Its twenty-four poems are narrated by a vast range of characters including: Philip Larkin, the fiancée of Elvis Presley, a romantic novelist dying in an old people’s home and a cockerel in the court of the Shogun. The settings range from Woodstock to Glyndebourne to Kyoto to the Garden of Eden: the final poem is a rendering of the Book of Genesis in the form of a text message.

This pamphlet is currently out of print but can be downloaded from this link.

‘The Lotus Bunker’ was shortlisted for the Live Canon International Poetry Prize and appears in The Live Canon 2018 Anthology.

Live Canon Anthology 2018 cover

‘The Butterfly Factory’ in Humanagerie, ed. By Sarah Doyle and Allen Ashley (Eibonvale Press): order from the Eibonvale website.

‘Temples of Mankestar’ in The Rialto Pamphlet Competition Shortlisted Poets.