RDN’s poems.

These are recordings of my reading of three linked poems on the British Army WW2 General, Sir Percy Hobart . They were written to be spoken. The work is, I hope, in the rather straightforward narrative tradition of English poetry. It is certainly not high-flown poetry. But I hope people will feel that it certainly isn't prose either. The Trilogy is in text form in the RDN site's Poems category. Read more...

This long poem is in three parts. All of them are long, and intended to flow one from another, but each to make sense on its own. They have been written with an eye (or ear) to being read aloud briskly. An audio version is available here. Sir Percy Hobart (1885 – 1957) was a great man: he was crucial to the formation and training of Britain's WW2 tank units, but he was also creative and - in effect - a military publisher. Sir Percy Hobart, Part 1 Hobo, the man and commander Sir Percy Hobart, Part 2 Hobo the man of design and fabric Sir Percy Hobart, Part 3 The Hobo, his generation and their books Read more...

Vera Bax, poet and painter, lost two sons in WW2. Both were RAF pilots. She wrote a sequence of four poems on losing them. Some of the poems have been in various anthologies ever since. Read more...

I am not clubbable, though I used to be rather more sociable. I have never been a loner. I dislike any sort of trap, seeking aisle seats and the back row. But I have always fantasised about the satisfactions of small spaces. The problem is: how to avoid self-pity or self-aggrandisement when one is fantasising about voluntary - chosen - isolation or confinement? Read more...

My wife has been actively hoping to see a Kingfisher for even longer than the 18 years we have loved each other. Various trips on or by various likely rivers - especially the Stour at Wimborne and the Severn at Symonds Yat - didn't deliver. The much less purely rural Thames at Marlow did, though. Read more...

My wife and I have been house-sitting near Henley: the large, arty house and its absent household made a big impression. Read more...

My friend, the designer, illustrator and writer, Paul Burridge, has been restoring his Macwester 28 for a couple of years and he took a couple of us on her first voyage under his ownership on 7 July 2014. It was a great day. Read more...

Poetry

A word and a thought,
old friends,
but caught in stale marriages,
meet and fall in love.… Read more...

This poems tries to catch how scraps of childhood memory are such an important living background. Read more...

It's curious how youthful optimism hasn't dimmed: I have been around long enough to be sceptical of achieving much now, but my aspirations are neither reduced nor feverish, so far as a I can see. Read more...