I was ambling round the internet during the week and came upon a poet new to me whose work is right up my street being quirky and unconventional. 

Her name is Margaret Griffiths. As usual I am late to the party since she died in 2009. What is so remarkable about her story is that despite being a fine poet she was reluctant to publish and when she did so it was to online venues and forums. On many occasions she used the pseudonyms ‘Maz’  or ‘Grasshopper’.  In time she developed a fol...

Word hoard has dried up.

My writing pattern seems to be ….a flurry of poems then nothing which is where I am now. Sometimes I forget that writing poetry is not like making something in a factory. I tend to finish one and then think ’Next’ only to find the ideas have dried up. I end up forcing some poems that are howlers and so have to be discarded.

During the week I read Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader.  I hadn’t read a book for ages but it was recommended by a friend so I sifted through EBay.

I assumed it would be a modern take on Virginia Woolf. How wrong I was. The story is ostensibly about the queen becoming an auto didactic via a chance encounter with a travelling library. Yet it becomes amongst the humour a discussion on why we should read and how one book leads to another.

It only took about an hour and a half to comp...

Last night I watched BBC2’s coverage of ‘World Book Night’. The majority of books given away were contemporary and I have to confess that although I recognized the titles I haven’t read the novels themselves.

There are several reasons for this.  I really don’t like modern or rather post modern novels so my reading history tends to cut out in the early 1960s. I think it’s a dislike of  both style and subject matter which doesn’t leave me with much to go on.

I also found...