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This collection has been many years in the writing. This is partly due to the sensitivity of its inspiration. When I was about 11 years old, I joined a poetry group at the Children’s Arts Centre, Cheltenham. A leading light of the group was a young poet, about 7 years older than me, called Lucy Partington. In 1973 Lucy disappeared on her way home. We talked about her a lot over the years that followed. When I was 15, I went on holiday to Greece and shared a room with Lucy’s m

Red Riding Hood Meets the Wolf - Illustration by Walter Crane Whether it is state terror or the individual evil of a misogynist serial killer, most of us are in denial. It couldn’t happen to us. The man we pass on the street cannot be a murderer.  Our country would never slip into tyranny. Worse still, we see the danger in the wrong places, fearing those who are different (the stranger), rather than people who seem to be like us. And if we do see evil, how can we speak of it?

Vasilisa at the hut of Baba Yaga by Ivan Bilibin My new poetry collection Something In Nothing includes this endpiece: Something In Nothing uses fairy tales as a means of talking about dark matters in a safe way. This is after all what fairytales have always done – stories about not taking sweets (or gingerbread) from strangers, about child neglect and worse. I grew up on fairy tales, having worked my way through all Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books  in my local library and watched

Anna Saunders and I will be reading at Riff Corner in Clevedon on Monday. Details in photo.

Anna Saunders and I both spend a lot of time giving opportunities for poets to read their work, whether online or at the in-Cheltenham...