Rock-Salt

‘The miracle of loving what dies’ – Albert Camus The miracle of a girl who – at school in summer in the twenties, dawdling with her friends in a brine cavern, among the carved passages under the fields – after getting back late one afternoon, was ordered to talk to the class about rock-salt, and…

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Mile End Opera

The man with whiskers of ponytail hair growing out of the back of his shaved skull, the woman with the Anna Ford face, catacombed under London with other strangers. Cornered, like prison visitors. Swaying with the machinery. Also a boy and girl – he’s black, she’s white. Beautiful black and white. He’s telling her about…

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Deja Vu

Early morning sun. The day is bracing. There`s some wind in the trees. The fog moves. You`re at the mail-box down on the dusty road. A letter from England? Yes, it is. Popped inside those bundles of glossy junk. Your name on the envelope in my handwriting – strange, since I`m asleep in the bed…

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The White Mountains

Animal cities crowded to deep time fointing and unsheeting out of the sea, flowers of the sea whose petals changed to mica where they fell. Nothing contracted from softness is alive but moves towards a region we can`t reach – That scarp, down from Sierra ice in setting light on Nevada. Our camp in the…

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On Dinosaur Point

Certain moments, hardly noticed at the time, can in retrospect seem to have had direct designs upon the future, opening up perspectives, emotional and physical, into a new space. Remembering how I began to write this book, at the back of my mind is a field of dry grass and orange-yellow Californian poppies on the…

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Poets I Go Back To

In 1968, my second year at university, I read two or three books (two of them poetry) that influenced my thinking and writing for at least two decades. Whether the influences have worn off I don`t know; maybe they never do. I go back to the actual texts quite rarely. I go back to the…

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