Just finished: The Amendments, Niamh Mulvey. I was sent an advance review copy by picador. It took me a while to warm up to this one, but in the end I really enjoyed the way Mulvey delivers complex difficult emotions using straightforward language, not wallowing in grief but also not flinching away from some of the hardest conversations around birth, death and religion. And I do have a soft spot for Irish writers, and multi-generational stories

A splash of red livening things up 🍅

Just enough sun to open a window

Every spring the light starts to reach over the book stacks, that's how I know it's about to get warmer

I am starting the fire

Me and my book, people-watching in Soho

Statues and busts in the 'Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change' exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts

Two pieces for the cover of the Resonance Poetry Anthology 2024, 'Kūfiyyah' and 'Matchstick'.

‘Kūfiyyah’ (front) is named for the traditional Palestinian scarf pattern widely known as a symbol of liberation and solidarity. As a poet myself, this piece is a celebration of poetry’s role in abolition, in cutting the chain, making holes in the world, breaking apart language, dismantling the systems that keep us from our collective liberation. It’s also about negative space, one of the key things that makes poems, well, poems: the shape of words on the page, and the importance of their relationship to the blank page and the things that are left unsaid – because there are always things we can’t find the words to say, and the words are where we attempt to bridge the gap. 

And as always, at the centre, a circle: the endless returning of everything to itself. that carries across to ‘Matchstick’, named for the late great Matchstick Piehouse, the place where Resonance grew into what it is today. Back in January I was thinking about what I wanted from these works and I wrote a little note (a poem?) to capture a fleeting idea: hands hold / hands hold / hands hold. That became a piece that is at it’s core about how we’ve held each other: held space, held a lighter, held vigils, held hands. One hand being pulled into the circle from outside was just an attempt to say you’re always welcome at Resonance. We’ve had so many first-time readers who have come back and grown into truly phenomenal poets. Long may it continue.

Whale Fall, Elizabeth O'Connor – I was sent an advance review copy by picador, it comes out later this month. A powerful short novel with themes of environment, relationships with nature, colonisation, fascism, community, loss, grief, the impact of biased documentation and archiving, and the role of gender in society.

I really liked this, it hones in on a young girl coming of age on an unnamed island off the coast of wales, in the weeks leading up to war being declared in england.

What struck me was how precise and unflinching the language is in this text where images of island life are shrouded in a blanket of dramatic irony. Whales as literary allegory could feel overdone but not here, where the urgent message against fascism, against humans selfishly taking and appropriating for their own gain – whether from nature or other humans – is frank but not overwritten.

Long weekend: holding hands walking round the gallery, an empty pint glass on a brass table, hot cross buns in a paper bag, blue, blue, blue

Like a magpie, delights in collecting shiny talismans

Debris of love at R & T's engagement party ❤️

The best book I’ve read so far this year is Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.

When poets write novels I always get very excited because they enter into their contract with words in a different way to other writers, with a certain level of distrust of language’s abilities, with an understanding of the disappointing paradox in metaphors, and with a playful abandon for convention.

This book is a great example of all of those things. It tore me open so many times and put me back together again, too. It’s got everything — family, identity, death, nationality, history, death, art, politics, death, love, war, did I mention death, and dreams where the dead speak to cartoon characters

Sunday, at the flower market in east

It must be spring 🥐🌼

Our apartment, a garden in bloom

Our apartment, a bouquet