"I wrote poetry while I was at Newcastle University, and despite some publication which 
 ought to have encouraged me, I gave it up as a hopeless occupation for a while. Instead, 
 I wrote a series of unpublished novels, which taught me most of what I know about writing, 
 apart from that gained by large amounts of reading - anything from Proust to the proverbial bus ticket. 

 Poetry comes to my desk every day in book and typescript. I have not lost my love of Greek 
 and Latin poetry, nor of English Poetry from Chaucer through the Golden Treasury to Eliot and Auden. 
 In my years in Scotland I have become something of a specialist in Scottish poetry and the 
 language and dialects of Scots. I have been studying Scottish Gaelic for some years. 
 I hope you will look at "Poetry Scotland's" website in which my hand may be readily discerned, 
 but which is managed and run by webmaster and poet Colin Will."
 


                          At Morden Tower
	
	As I was leaving Morden Tower
	a man like Thomas Bewick spoke to me,
	the face I would associate
	with my quick artist under wide-brimmed hat,
	dressed for a ramble, a spot of fishing,
	alert to bird on soughing tree.
	This man had had a drink or two -
	who wouldn't, hearing poetry in the city?
	He couldn't get his story out -
	something about Bewick he wanted to tell me.
	Preamble, stumble, preamble. My friends
	were putting on their gloves, and waiting, so
	I had to go.	
	Who was he? From which century or decade
	climbing the turret staircase, to what end?



	Poetic justice

	When your garden
	shed burns down,
	huge firemen come
	in darkness with
	their flashing vehicles
	and hose it down
	to crumbling charcoal
	smouldering and wet
	
	it is not poetic
	
	yet when you tot up
	the little damage -
	twice demoted
	storage units,
	empty flowerpots,
	things for the tip,
	you smile ruefully,
	and readily admit
	
	it is not tragic.
	
	and when you consider
	the improvement to the garden	
	architecture, and that	
	one less ugly shed
	exists in the world
	and your boat wasn't in it
	you almost feel like
	going out specially
	
	to thank the vandals
	
	but you don't, because
	you don't suppose
	they guessed you weren't fussed
	for that old pushbike
	or knew in advance
	you would quickly realise
	you liked the garden
	better without the shed -
	
	poetic justice.




	Newcastle upon a time

	Coming out of the Metro which still further
	muddled me as to which city I was in,
	I rediscovered Grainger Street and Monument,
	gleaming fine Georgian streets, so long
	preserved in grime and hugged to Tyneside's
	persistently unhealthy chest, while trolleybuses
	whirred slowly in from Jesmond, shoppers
	bustled blackly from Fenwicks to Binns.
	Could I be so cruel as to harp on Eldon Square,
	so sentimental as to dream of flower market,
	the flower sellers using shillings still
	against the threats of law; and pubs like pits,
	territories without skirts till teenagers
	staked out their own streets of converted bars,
	no more sawdust but still the crack, extended
	to parties on the homeward late night bus.

	I walked into the Grainger Market
	as it was closing one Thursday afternoon,
	its priests busily trundling bins of waste,
	among immortal queues to buy tomatoes,
	the unchanged name of Robinson on the bookstall,
	the flower lady ageless as a mermaid
	among her pails of buds and leafstalks.
	I trundled round the university
	and rattled past the Byker Wall,
	reassured that still the swing bridge slunk
	between its higher, newer neighbours.
	
	It's new, it's old, and it's Newcastle. Since
	my brother and I aged ten and twelve
	were allowed out to see a film, and chose
	to ride to Byker, which year was it,
	Newcastle's never failed to absorb me,
	never seemed to resent my unfaithfulness,
	always presenting eyefuls, mindfuls.
	Whether I arrive for a day or a decade
	it seems to recognise me,
	and though I'm half ashamed of having left
	a perfectly good place to live, and leaving
	was like divorcing this for my own good,
	and I creep in now from another home,
	it works and churns up memories just the same
	as it pans out from the station and the train.