Welcome to my website, where you can read about my publications to date, my interests and experiences, my hopes for the future and my ideas. I use the blog to post poetry reviews and short essays on individual poems and  collections. There is also a contacts page where you can email me. I’ve spent most of my working life as an English teacher at the Manchester Grammar School. Teaching has been a wonderfully stimulating and rewarding way of life, despite the inhibiting pressure of exams. Now I organise poetry discussion groups, write reviews, read more widely and write more of my own poetry.

Saturday Poetry Discussions in the Manchester Buddhist Centre:
We have been very fortunate to be offered accomodation in the library at the Manchester Buddhist Centre at 16–20 Turner Street, Manchester M4 1DZ. These events are open to anyone who wants to come, and there’s no need to book, but people attending will need to bring their own copies of the poems we discuss.

There’s no payment for the group as such but I do ask people attending to make a £5 donation to the Buddhist Centre. I will collect this donation at the meeting.

Poets we’ve read and talked about include Alice Oswald, Andrew Marvell, Anne Stevenson, Basil Bunting, Constantine Cavafy, David Constantine, Derek Mahon, Edward Thomas, Edwin Morgan, Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound, Fiona Sampson, Fleur Adcock, Geoffrey Hill, George Seferis, Hannah Lowe, Helen Dunmore, Hugo Williams, Jane Draycott, Jen Hadfield, Jo Shapcott, John Donne, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Katharine Towers, Linda France, Louise Glück, Mary Jean Chan, Michael Longley, Philip Larkin, Rebecca Perry, Rilke, Robin Robertson, Ruth Padel, Seamus Heaney, Seán Hewitt, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Tishani Doshi, Tomas Tranströmer, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, W S Merwin and Wallace Stevens.

Sessions at the Buddhist Centre have been suspended during the coronavirus crisis, though monthly discussions have resumed via Zoom.