Poems.

Hove, in west Sussex, feels to me like an incubator of the future. It's not just that its population is youthful but that so many of the young seem successful. I imagine them to be getting and spending in ways probably not known ten or twenty years ago. This is an springtime upbeat piece, about 1,000 words in all, and takes around ten minutes to read aloud. Read more...

Here, four moments from the 1980s and the 2010s provide the vignettes which I hope convey how an auto-didact skips and slithers, in a hungry sort of way, amongst the wit and wisdom of his betters. Read more...

These London Trio poems are: London 1: Marylebone London 2: The Thames London 3: Pimlico, Soho and Hampstead Read more...

These Norfolk Spring Trio poems are: #1 Blackthorn Winter #2 Church and Copse #3 Norfolk, UK, The Universe Read more...

This isn't about me, at least not in particular, and it isn't gloomy, I hope. I fear it offers advice, which - it might be remembered - comes from a man with little courage and no pretensions to wisdom. Read more...

My wife and I house-, chicken-, and dog-sit near Henley. This part of the Chilterns is far deeper countryside than I had ever expected. Read more...

I came across this news story from a local paper about a suicide-by-train  and wanted to mark it in some way. I feel oddly scrupulous about opining too much, or seeming to assume any understanding of the events it describes. Read more...

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...