RDN’s poems.

Chris Allinson, a master in portraiture (paint) and Haiku (brevity) took me to the excellent Bridge Inn at Shoreham-by-Sea ("fresh local fish", lively mixed crowd), and put my hat on straight about my "poetry". Please note my quotation marks. He said something like, "I like your stuff about Alfie and Bernardine Bishop, but it's not really poetry". Before I got upetty, he smoothly proceeded, "You ought to be looking at Haibun". Read more...

My wife had a Jack Russell for five years until this summer. We miss him, though he was a stroppy little beggar (and perhaps because he was). Read more...

I wrote this poem as a first attempt at doing justice to the pleasure I get in almost any site to do with the waste industry but perhaps especially recycling facilities. Read more...

It's not important why I lost touch with Bernardine Bishop and my friend, later her husband, Dr Bill Chambers. I feel a fool for letting it happen and it's a lack made even more sharp by her death. Her novels and other writing will last, and their publication make an extraordinary story, both literary and personal. I wrote this for me, of course, but also for Matt, her elder son, because he very kindly included me in her funeral, an event which was exhilarating as well as tearful. Read more...

This is the first poem I posted on my website. Something like it had been in my mind from visits to Crete and Pembrokeshire, but it was really prompted by my daughter Emma. She was celebrating Peter Renwick's birthday today and wanted a poem for the occasion. She and I had been visiting the Rex Whistler works in a temporary show at Salisbury Museum and his room at Mottisfont Abbey. Afterwards, we went for a walk on Stockbridge Down, our first there. Read more...