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Empower Growth Start Now

Bob's Current Reading List These are all the books I have read and recommend from the past year of reading Click pictures to see the book cover full size Funland and Other Poems Dannie Abse Hutchinson of London, London, 1973 Current reading (Note: link goes to Abe Books UK) Click to go the publisher's website Five Fifty-Five Maura Dooley Bloodaxe Books, Hexham, Northumberland, 2023 Leeds Stanza choice April 2026 Date completed: 7th May, 2026 Click to go the publisher's website Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division Deborah Curtis faber and faber, London, 1995. 2001 edition. For the lyrics of Ian Curtis pp 145-201 Date completed: 7th May, 2026 Click to go the publisher's website Dynamo Luke Samuel Yates smith | doorstop Sheffield 2023 Date completed: 28th April, 2026 Click to go the publisher's website New Cemetery Simon Armitage Faber and Faber, London, 2025 I listened to this as an audiobook read by the author on 31st March, 2026 Click to go the publisher's website Self-Portrait As Othello Jason Allen-Paisant Carcanet Poetry, Manchester, 2023 Leeds Stanza choice March 2026 Poetry Book Society Book choice March 2023 Completed re-reading: 22nd April, 2026 Click to go the publisher's website the North Issue 71 Magazine subscription Current reading Click to go the publisher's website Invocation Izzy Brittain Yaffle's Nest, Horsforth, 2025 Date completed: 11th March, 2026 Click to go the publisher's website Letters to a Young Poet Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by M.D. Herter Norton W.W. Norton and Company, London, 2004. (Revised edition. Originally published 1934.) Current reading Click to go the publisher's website An Uncharacteristically Lengthy Poem by Dean Wilson About Interpretive Dance Dean Wilson DeanWorld, 2025 Date completed: 25th February, 2026 Click to go the publisher's website Gain Access Ian Harker Smith | Doorstop Books, Sheffield, 2025 Pamphlet Date completed: 24th February, 2026 Click to go the publisher's website House Anthems Ralph Dartford Valley Press, Scarborough, 2024 Date completed: 20th February, 2026 Click to go the publisher's website Wellwater Karen Solie Picador Poetry, London, 2025 Leeds Stanza choice, February 2026 Date Completed: 16/02/2026 Click to go the publisher's website My Life In Verse. A Journey Through Poetry Edited by Alexis Kirschbaum Penguin Classics, London, 2009 Current anthology read Click to go the publisher's website The Taking Part Joe Williams Maytree Press Pamphlet Re-read: 31 January 2026 Click to go the publisher's website The Iliad Homer, translated by Emily Wilson W.W.Norton and Company, London, 2023 Leeds Stanza December 2025 / January 2026 Choice Date Completed 16/ 01/2026 Click to go the publisher's website Side-eye Matt Nicholson Yaffle, Horsforth, 2025 Date Completed:18/12/2025 Click to go the publisher's website Mouth Mona Arshi Chatto & Windus, London, 2025 Poetry Book Society Autumn 2025 choice Date completed: 30/11/2025 Click to go the publisher's website Swell Maria Ferguson Penguin Books, London, 2025 Date completed: 27th November, 2025 Click to go the publisher's website Pulling Faces Zakariye Little Betty, Nottingham, 2025 Pamphlet Date completed: 26th November, 2025 Click to go the publisher's website Like a Tree, Walking Vahni Capildeo Carcanet Poetry, Manchester, 2021 Poetry Book Society Choice, Winter 2021 Date completed: 20th November, 2025 Click to go the publisher's website Bread and Circus Airea D. Matthews Picador, London, 2023 Poetry Book Society Choice Summer 2023 Date completed: 17th November 2025 Click to go the publisher's website Thin Spells Kristina Diprose Black Cat Poetry Press, UK, 2025 Pamphlet Date completed: 8th October, 2026 Click to go the publisher's website Killing the Piano Joe Williams Half Moon Books, Otley, 2017 Date read: 5/10/2025 Click to go the publisher's website

Empower Growth Start Now

Leeds Stanza February 2025 choice : June Jordan 'Haruko/Love Poems' 'Haruko/Love Poems' by June Jordan The story of this book begins with me ordering a copy that was almost full price and sold as 'very good' but the condition was awful. I wrote to the company that I bought it from and demanded a rebate. In the mean time I thought I'd better get on and read it, or I wouldn't get it read in time for February's feedback. Truth is, I did not enjoy it at first. I found the poems so personal, but not universal. I mean fine if this poem had be written for me, as I would get the references and would love the attention. so, I began to consider the poems solipsistic, and only available in the book because of the reputation of the author, whom I have no doubt deserves her reputation, but her love poetry, really? There is nothing complicated about the language, there were no words to look up, but truthfully I just didn't get it. In the mean time the company who mis-sold me the book, were bartering with me saying they would return 30%, and I was thinking but my book is tatty, I'm not enjoying it, give me all the money back so I can get a new copy! It was water damaged, stained and had dints in the cover. I was hating the experience. Then, I read 'Poem For Mark' with its reference to the UK and its quaint 1950s Cockney language, and I smiled and I had a reference point. It occurred to me that I was not really getting into the mind of the author, and I needed to work harder at doing this. When 'Free Flight' came along she gives us the very workings of her mind at the moment the thoughts occurred to her. Then I understood all the poems more. I believe what we have is very raw poetry, not overly filtered and highly emotional, which on the one hand is the reason that, as a bloke, I'm not immediately going to get it, and I'm always going to have to work harder at love poetry. Then something else twigged. I love writing this sort of poetry myself, was I a little jealous that someone else had got there first, was getting published writing in a style that in fact I utterly relate to? I believe the poetry is much better read out aloud, it makes much more sense of the immediate simple rhymes, the illogical line breaks, and the easy language. She is in the poetry moment, somewhere closer to slam than Tennyson. It reads better out loud than read on the page. For me, anyway. I haven't tested this with watching videos of June Jordan reading her poetry, it just made sense to me as I progressed though the book. Then I got to my favourite poem, 'I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies', which uses powerful repetition and challenges you to not accept the horrors going on around you without letting others know that you do not accept it. This message is never irrelevant, but with the wars of Russia/Ukraine and Palestine/Israel so large in the news, and Donald Trump lording himself over the lot of it, I realise how little I dare to take sides in case I upset one or other of my friends at the expense of my own ideals. So by the time I got to the final epic poem 'Roman Poem Number Five' I was starting to feel the vibe. June Jordan is turning her inner experience into tangible poetry expression, and my biggest mistake is that I'm not doing the same. I went round the Cathedral of Barcelona recently, how come I didn't write a poem about my experience of it? In fact I will answer that. 1) I'm intrinsically lazy, and 2) I didn't know how. Read the book in front of you, Bob, this is how. Enter the moment and express it. This is what June Jordan is doing and I love her for it. So once I got to the final page, she had converted me. I was I love with her honesty and emotion and the whole book felt real. Then I thought, how can I get rid of this copy? How could I send it back? This very print, paper and glue got me right into the mind of another human being, and I want to savour that. I love my copy. Why exchange a lived-in book with damages that must have stories I need to invent and tell, with a starchy, dull, soulless brand new copy? I wrote to the sellers, and thanked them for the offer which had now been upped to a full refund, and said I was scared they would throw my copy away, and we should never throw anything away for simply not being perfect, after all, who of us is perfect? So I have kept my copy, and I will treasure the imperfect scruffy friend that helped me understand the wonderful June Jordan a little better.

'Read Me A Poem a Day' 9th April 2021 'Read Me A Poem a Day for the National Year of Reading.' Chosen by Gaby Morgan, pp 278-283. OK so why is a serious reader of poetry like me reading what looks like a children's book of daily poems. Well the answer is simple and quite clever. It is my doorway into starting reading. Some days, like today, I am just itching to read my next fill of Fran Lock poetry, but often I don't know where to begin, so I have my starter daily books. I began reading this book (and the Shakespeare) on 1 November 2020, which represents the first day of my retirement (two years earlier) . Every year I task myself with doing a certain number of hours of reading and I start the clock on this day. This book has been wonderful. In today's batch there was poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Grace Nichols, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jackie Kay, Langston Hughes, sat alongside a regular Anon. I had 6 days to catch up, as I had concentrated so much on writing the brand new website! That said, it only took a few minutes. I did a lot of poetry reading and listening from 2010 to 2014 (-ish), before deciding to knock it on the head to complete my pension. I have returned to reading now I am retired. Lockdown was awful, obviously. My father died from Covid-19 in March 2020 right at the beginning of it all. On the other hand, it helped me to concentrate my mind. As there was nowhere to go, I have found a place to be by reading poetry again. During that last poetry phase (there have been many but 2010-2014 was especially enjoyable) I got to see both Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay. That's the wonderful thing about poetry compared with say, football or rock music, it is still relatively easy to not only see your heroes but also to go up and have a few words of chat with them afterwards! Jackie Kay's poem here is called 'Divorce' and in the wrong hands reads as a very dark tale of divorcing your parents. I am fairly certain Jackie Kay loved her adoptive parents, so perhaps this is intended as a cathartic tale where children can agree in their anger when reading the poem before bed at night only to wake up in the morning refreshed! 'Father, your breath smells like a camel's and it gives me the hump!' Seeing the Anons in this collection I always grieve for the lost name. How sad for the person that their immortalised words have become mortally detached. Here Anon is talking about an apple... 'It's nice to think, though many an eye Has seen the ruddy skin, Mine is the very first to spy The five brown pips within.'

The commission is an unusual beast, someone asks for a poem on a subject, the poet goes away and thinks about it and comes up with the goods. Today I heard Ian McMillan's poem for 'The Front Page' BBC Radio 4 programme. Asked to write about a poem for the Euro 2020 final the week before England played Italy, and lost on penalties, then delivering it week after. The poem is never going to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland , but it did its job. I also understood it, and got it in one, unlike T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland , which I have heard many times, but in truth need academics to point out to me why it is good. In the poem, McMillan refers to Eliot, and as a reader it would enhance the experience if I knew the reference. (I didn't.). McMillan is a decent chap, he is not going to condemn me for not picking it up, but I should I condemn myself? There is so much poetry about, how can I know it all? As it so goes I have read a good deal of it, but when I am sat in a reading, am I supposed to bring my poetry history with me or simply enjoy the moment, are there two opposites, or have I constructed this myself? If I don't know my poetry history then I am freed from the challenge of acknowledging it? I know my music better, so in my world I would say - should a young rapper know the songs of Elvis and the Beatles, should they even know the history of the song the rapper may have sampled, or is it enough to know your own genre well, or even, then just live in the moment and enjoy the song? I find, a little like Classical music, there is an inbuilt elitism in poetry that is hard to shake off, even if the poet themselves tells you to shake it off. (And by Classical music I mean Mozart, Beethoven and that crowd, not Led Zep and Black Sabbath, which is how I hear the word being used now! Though, actually that has its elitism, too!) In spite of all this I can tell that McMillan's poem is no The Wasteland , so there is a difference, and getting back to the beginning commissions make for a very different, more accessible poetry. I guess this is because in this circumstance the poet is writing for the audience and not themselves. When I read Simon Armitage's Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic, a book filled with commissioned poetry I enjoyed it greatly, but ultimately it did leave me a little bit hollow by the end. What Armitage is so good at is writing in a poetic voice that is both authentic, and poetic, it feels like if you had sat down long enough thinking about it with a pen in your hand, you could have written it, too. This is a wonderful deception. As Poet Laurette, suddenly everything he writes feels like it is a commission, almost by the nature of the job. I have read his Lockdown Poem and watched the Lockdown film on television, both wonderful pieces of works, that describe explain Lockdown better than any documentary ever could. Poetry gets behind the mere facts and emphases the emotional, and though we believe we are a religion-less society, it speak in the language of our spiritual being, too. I notice, though that when presented to the World on the internet, the Lockdown poem is presented with a backbeat, and acted out images, and I wonder at the reason for this. Am I being elitist for noticing it, am I rejecting it? Or am I pleased that Armitage is doing his bit to bring poetry to the World in a populist way, surely another of the possible unwritten role of the Laureate's job. The film which intermingles poetry with talking heads, is perfect time capsule for the future. The individual stories of people affected by Covid-19, are emotional in themselves, woven into the overall arc of a poem provided by Armitage, they become a part of the poetic piece, and the emotion is turned up to 11 (a cultural reference I expect you to get, but if you don't it feels like I thought of the joke!). To help the watcher along two ethereal dancers interpret the parts where Armitage is talking as if to emphasise we are talking in poetry language now. A good trick, but once I spotted it I started to laugh at the thought that every time Armitage gives a reading in the real world two dancers would suddenly appear in the wings. Today I watched a poem which came to me via Facebook I believe, and I notice that the poet has put a backdrop of old film footage to enhance the film. I always wonder at this, it is almost as if the poet is concerned that the poem will not be entertaining enough in its own right, that there is an alternative show going on in case you don't want to listen to what's being said enough. It's a tremendous piece, as authentic as you get written by person from Glasgow, about what that experience is like. Such a great feat. Sadly no BBC4 commissions await for the poet, so we create our own film to be in. The commission as income, that's what it is there for and quite right. There is so much poetry about yet so few professional poets, it seems all wrong to the likes of me that love poetry, but look at me I prefer the free readings to the paid for ones, and I am a generous person.