The first thing we had to clear was the one

he prized the most: the cluttered pinewood bar

he’d salvaged from a neighbour moving on

at the end of the nineteen seventies.

Embalmed in a gloopy coat of varnish

that set to a brittle sheen, it lacked retro chic,

scuffed down to the wood along its edges,

its surface crazed with memories.

In the days when family came ...

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It wasn’t the music that drew him,

not at first, but the shape it made

on a stand and the way it took

the light, staring back at him

from the pawnshop window.

And so he decided then and there

he’d learn to play it, taking

for granted his gift and the right

he’d have to cradle it

once he had mastered the keys.

Those first uncertain months

it honked and s...

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In the dark age before Wikipedia

Brooke Bond tea cards dished the data

in a week-by-week drip feed

of bet-you-didn’t-know-that facts.

You could buy an album for sixpence

or snap an elastic band around them –

pocket-friendly, dependable,

your own bright almanac.

But couldn’t your family drink more tea?

– your mother refusing, stubbornly,

to open the packets u...

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I’m working back to the dreamtime

of St James Primary in sixty-three,

the occluded and innocent days

before the gadgets and money took over –

like trying to retrieve the original colours

of bright, ridged slabs of plasticine

from muddied clumps we used

for project work in the afternoons –

my finest effort the model I made

with Terence O’Neill of the martyrdom

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I’m working back to the dreamtime

of St James Primary in sixty-three,

the occluded and innocent days

before the gadgets and money took over –

like trying to retrieve the original colours

of bright, ridged slabs of plasticine

from muddied clumps we used

for project work in the afternoons –

my finest effort the model I made

with Terence O’Neill of the martyrdom

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I’m working back to the dreamtime

of St James Primary in sixty-three,

the occluded and innocent days

before the gadgets and money took over –

like trying to retrieve the original colours

of bright, ridged slabs of plasticine

from muddied clumps we used

for project work in the afternoons –

my finest effort the model I made

with Terence O’Neill of the martyrdom

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From compartment windows

they were fake, too far away

to be real. Friesians, Shorthorns,

Angus: painted cows

in a book of fields –

while on the train I rampaged,

shuttling impatience

through pages and pages

of green. Unexpectedly,

we'd arrive and land in a world

where they moped.

The first day up, a drover,

I'd goad them on with a stick

then s...

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for my grandfather

When I first came on a visit

to your lime-washed house

– a clean-kneed child from town –

your two great fists

impressed me, for they

were ponderous chunks

of granite, notched

carelessly for fingers

and which, at your own willed

creation, you had torn

from the heart of the land.

Yes, I knew then how

you had risen and, ...

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for my grandfather

When I first came on a visit

to your lime-washed house

– a clean-kneed child from town –

your two great fists

impressed me, for they

were ponderous chunks

of granite, notched

carelessly for fingers

and which, at your own willed

creation, you had torn

from the heart of the land.

Yes, I knew then how

you had risen and, sep...

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la petite phrase  Proust

Back home and married

after our year abroad,

the heat was on all summer

as mortgage rates

and temperatures soared.

Recording it now,

the memory’s triggered

by the music a DJ plays –

which happens to be

George Benson’s Breezin’,

the track that eased me

into jazz, clocking on

in the council yard

to get one step ahead.

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Without so much as a thread of decency,

Antoninus Elagabalus, high priest

and mother’s boy, made biographers weep.

Proponents of discipline almost choked,

repeating the syllables of his name.

His sculpted head is unremarkable

and bears no trace of his supposed excesses;

the muddled genes of his outlandishness

those of a handsome kid who, like the best

of us, w...

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As over and over the same chords churn

your notes pour forth in spate –

sheets of sound erupting till harmony

is wrenched awry; and when you sweated

smack to cleanse your system,

you were hell-bent on an afterlife,

a body refreshed, believing.

You could call it Love, but sombre,

that force that drives you on.

Hearing you now, I feel reproved

for all the...

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for Joni Mitchell

Cactus Tree was our song, the one

that lit a flame, when I heard you sing

and taped you, bruised and plaintive,

on John Peel’s Top Gear. Straight off

your gift possessed me, too young

in sixty-eight for you to even notice

how I tagged along: the one face

in the entourage who really got you

and realized that other men

would leave y...

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It’s early evening and the TV is on.

You lay the table and children scream,

the frayed ends of day unravelling.

Through a jumble of bricks and cars

you enter the room with plates,

where sounds of appetite assail you;

while relayed at a distance

there’s news of war, its violence

annulling simple-minded schemes.

In a sealed-off quarter of a dusty city

...

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There are times your dancers undermine

the humanist in me. In that northern

Cockaigne, you viewed with a realist's eye,

their heartiness tramps to raucous tuning.

Unconstrained, the couples are blatant.

The heaving trestles are piled with plates.

Such carouses, what were they to you?

Did you celebrate, despise, or pity?

For there is shown mere lumbering daftness,

f...

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i.m. Seamus Heaney

'Away with the fairies' my wife will say

after we’ve been on a walk or I’m asked,

out of the blue, what I think of the dress

she’s spotted, when I’m only vaguely there –

pursuing the rhythms inside my head

and depriving her of my attention

as slowly, mysteriously, the lines

coalesce into 'another damn poem'.

And if at times I frustrate ...

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Imagine a world where pester power

rarely delivers the goods and a dawdling

hike to school’s the norm. You have fresh air,

your friends, and a small coin burning

a hole in your pocket. Spend it now

or do your best to make it last the week.

In class Rosanna Ferrario likes to sit

beside you. All the others make you blush.

They seem to know you like her too.

Give h...

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Imagine a world where pester power

rarely delivers the goods and a dawdling

hike to school’s the norm. You have fresh air,

your friends, and a small coin burning

a hole in your pocket. Spend it now

or do your best to make it last the week.

In class Rosanna Ferrario likes to sit

beside you. All the others make you blush.

They seem to know you like her too.

Give h...

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Mislaid for decades, I had never seen it

– the certificate they gave you the year

you finished school. Thirteen and biddable,

I doubt you had been much bother at all,

picking up quite easily the basics

prescribed for the life that lay before you.

Beyond the geography of small towns,

fields, and enigmatic hills, among which

your predecessors scratched out a  living

o...

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Outside in the street, where skies have opened,

a dingy curtain flaps across the day,

as rain beats down with blank persistence

on shining roofs of cars, dissolves

my windowpanes, bringing back to mind

for no apparent purpose a wet break

at primary school: how in partitioned rooms

with raggedy copies of Beano or Dandy,

we were fractious Bash Street Kids

with time enou...

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A small boy running, but not for his life,

as all can see in his fearless smile

and the sense of freedom

that lights his eyes. This is the day

he will always remember,

important only because of an errand

and the small coin he didn’t drop,

holding it up on tiptoes

across the counter of a baker’s shop,

disregarding for once

the glass-fronted shelves of...

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after Willi Ronis

She is like Eve in exile,

awakening each morning

when the sun has risen,

then rising herself,

shackled to the day’s routine.

She opens a shutter,

and the light sweeps in

across the uneven stone floor –

her summons to the tasks

that lie before her.

But first a strip-wash,

the astringent purity

of her ablutions. Leaning over

...

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The first car we owned was a 2CV

with no certifiable history.

The year we got together

we drove it to the end of its days.

With its tinny dinted roof

it had an air of slumped defeat

we rose above quite easily.

When summer broke all records

the windows that didn’t quite close

were an unexpected bonus.

Its mind-boggling gear stick

seemed set to leave its socket...

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for Ziyad

The first letter he has known for months

in zig-zag lines getting nowhere.

Turned on its side and crayoned blue

he can stretch it out like a river;

or if he changes colour can make

a mountain, some grass, a fire.

Cut back to its simplest form

and laid out in rows like ghosts,

he follows the dots over and over

before he does it on hi...

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The closest my dad ever got to poetry

was when he savoured some word

like pugilist, or the tip-toe springiness

he sensed in bob and weave,

his unalloyed delight in the flytings

and eyeball-to-eyeball hype

that went with big fight weigh-ins.

And maybe I should have been

a contender, when I did my stint

in the ring, my dad convinced

I had style and the stamp o...

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For Peter Robinson

I was listening to Dylan’s Time Out of Mind,

his late renewal after wasted years

– all simmer and wry despair –

to find that maybe he was rated again.

The voice was a wreck on a burnished track;

the songs a palimpsest of antique blues.

In the end the words will come

if they have to, like music that’s ghosted

by echoes stored in a phonogra...

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For too long unheeded, it’s time

to note their virtues: the way

they grip and take the strain;

their down-to-earth precision.

Gearing up doggedly, with only

occasional jolts and judders,

the odd involuntary moan,

they are truly fit for purpose,

when there’s work to do.

Tight-lipped and stubborn,

their staying power outlasts

newfangled knowingness,

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It’s always grounded in the two-four beat

of boot soles tramping across a field,

the plod of units across terrain

a general stakes his name on.

Holding the line, the kettle pounds

its rhythms of mutual fear. Embellished

with fifes, the snares are brash,

their prattle false as speeches

on recruitment day. Add some chimes

and majorettes, high-stepping,

winso...

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Its lack of reaction has made it unique,

that and the way it can magnetize fools:

forty-niners, Midas, the futures mob –

so gung-ho, yet always dazzled by it,

like urchins dreaming of gilded pavements.

Locked in a vault, it validates paper.

It's what the rich cling to when the bubble

bursts, smiling at the rest of us, our mouths

agape, who wonder why what's left

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‘The difficulty, then, is how far we are ourselves

the objects of our senses.’

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

Like a flimsy thread my vanity

clings to, it seems that as far

as logic’s concerned what I call

my self’s a phantom and no more

a part of me than skin, hair

or toenails are, shed by the strangers

they started out with.

So where is the screen ...

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after David Hockney

Through tangled centuries of ownership

and rights these trees have always survived.

Each one in its turn reduced to a stump,

they came back stronger, earning their keep.

The harsher the husbandry, the sturdier

they grew, for what do we know

that’s more dependable              

than roots, bole, and branches?

Retaining the vigour of ...

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i.m. Martin Cooke (1955-2021)

‘Behold the fowls of the air’

Matthew 6:26

This is the way it happens: a voice on the phone

explaining that one we took for granted

is no longer there, that junk food

and countless pints that wrecked

your balance and strained your heart

became in the end too much –

even at your shuffling pace.

Refusing to put a penny a...

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The King of the Delta Blues

The hellhounds always trailed him –

for that’s the drift of legends. 

Fuelling spooks with shots

of malt, he wailed out blues

across the Delta.

Between us now the record

crackles bleakly, his scratchy voice,

a conjured ghost, sings clear

as barrelhouse belles who fleeced him

strut across my sight.

In the rattling dives he ...

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for Paul

Going upstairs, I think of him still

in the bathroom, crooning. It's Danny Boy

or some doomed melody dredged up

from a past we're unable to share.

Nearly all of the words are missing

as he tries half-heartedly to reinvent them;

while the tune is sprightly,

pepped up for a night on the tiles.

When I played my records he told me

that music always need...

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All those years of it, the same

vague journey every place we went,

driving to work each holiday

in a choky, smoke-filled den

at the back of my father's Transit.

Life was the business of earning

your keep; no peace for a drone

in a house where you paid your way.

And each time my school books

were laid aside and the pencil-work

had ceased, it was back to early

s...

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Il faut parier Blaise Pascal

Bound over for playing pitch and toss

or, more portentously, having gambled

on Her Majesty's Highway,

my father was always an expert

at weighing up the odds,

made light of his brush with the law.

His gambling a science and pastime,

he never lost much, but knew

in the end that the world is flawed.

At best you could only break even.

...

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The clanking compound of the brewery

– where Dad did casual shifts

when building work was scarce –

is buried now beneath the floors

of a multi-storey car park

and chat that drifts across

from cappuccino pavements.

Born to a scant inheritance

of rushy Sligo acres, my dad was bred

like his brothers to follow the work,

sending remittances home

from London, Readin...

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The closest my dad ever got to poetry

was when he savoured some word

like pugilist, or the tip-toe springiness

he sensed in bob and weave,

his unalloyed delight in the flytings

and eyeball-to-eyeball hype

that went with big fight weigh-ins.

And maybe I should have been

a contender, when I did my stint

in the ring, my dad convinced

I had style and the stamp of a w...

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The dog-days scorch Bordeaux. Behind closed doors

at his desk he sits, charting norms through a sea

of print. As reason discovers the laws

that define the natural good, history

is a realm he surveys, its changing customs,

till day lies buried in a stack of tomes.

And all around his own domain prospers.

His ordered vines, absorbing light, ripen,

grow fat in that calm hi...

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The clanking compound of the brewery

– where Dad did casual shifts,

when building work was scarce –

is buried now beneath the floors

of a multi-storey car park

and chat that drifts across

from cappuccino pavements.

Born to a scant inheritance

of rushy Sligo acres, my dad was bred

like his brothers to follow the work,

sending remittances home

from London, Readi...

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i.m. John and James Cooke

They are on parade in perfect step
– my father and my father's brother –
strolling down a street in Dublin
where a breeze is freshening
and the nineteen-fifties
are loitering round the corner;
and even if I’ve no way
of asking either how they spent
the day, or what claim
each felt he'd a right to make
on an open-handed future,
they are still sharp in Sunday ...

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For a week now you have felt uneasy,

noticing signs. With skies even brighter

than those you dreamed of, you sensed a frenzy

in the crazed speck you crushed on a worktop.

Mapping imaginary lines across

your kitchen’s granary tiles, they have sent out

explorers – hewers and drawers –  to probe

your landscape of leakage and spills.

Tracking down their base to a crac...

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As I try to interpret the evidence

of bones shrunk to a homelier scale,

I imagine their vast migrations.

Keeping in step with a pillar

of dust, they lumbered stoically

from one mirage to the next.

For how many more thousands

of years could hunger lead them on

across parched wilderness,

salt-scorched and scrawled

with thorny growth – a whisper

of water in the s...

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Through a side gate, whose unassuming frame

is draped in swags of pale wisteria

like hairstyles worn by Victorian girls,

I return to a half-remembered space,

its neat enclosure more clearly defined

by flint walls than the past will ever be;

and where parched lawns, diminished and threadbare

in the unseasonable heat, mark out

a territory that can’t now be repossessed –

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Take a modest length of pipe, making sure

it’s clean and true, and try to blow through  it.

In that way you’ll get a sense of how

it was for Pan, when he played his Blues

for Syrinx on a lonely riverbank.

But if you wish to get beyond the wind

in the reeds and shivering leaves

you’ll need to choose some decent brass

that’s resonant, tough, and flexible,

buffing it ...

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It wasn’t the music that drew him,

not at first, but the shape it made

on a stand and the way it took

the light, staring back at him

from the pawnshop window.

And so he decided then and there

he’d learn to play it, taking

for granted his gift and the right

he’d have to cradle it

once he had mastered the keys.

Those first uncertain months

it honked and squ...

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Playing cards

at the back of the bus,

Sarah could swear

like one of the boys –

her mouth as foul

as any sailor’s.

Scatting hard

across the octaves,

her voice

was like a horn

swapping licks

with bop’s elite.

One step ahead

of the changes,

she harnessed time

as if she owned it

in pitch-perfect

glissandos.

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Never willing

to accept his place

or stroke

the violoncello politely

for a bow-tied

maestro,

only the bass

could match

his ego.

Swaying, possessed,

like a holy roller,

he goaded

his band

and slapped

the strings

to imprecation,

whoop

and holler.

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Praised to the skies

by a musicologist

when all

he had done

was play the blues,

he took time off

to clear his head.

Without

a padded loft

or a tumbledown

woodshed

in the Lower

East Side

of crowded

Manhattan,

he blew his sax

come rain or shine

way up on the Bridge.

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