Corrugated sand
Three piers and a tower
Wide open spaces
Blackpool Bard
When I read Doty’s Display of Mackerel,
Bishop’s Fish she caught with her lines,
I feel like a fish out of water,
Struggling to find some good rhymes.
I’m not a dab hand at writing,
A Yorkshire Simon ready to leap,
I’m not an Auden or Larkin,
Matthew Arnold On Dover Beach.
I’m not far out waving like Stevie,
Eliot’s persona eating a peach,
I’m not an incredible Heaney,
Digging with a pen in old peat.
I’m not a Hughes or a Hardy,
The Second Coming of Yeats.
I’m not a Rilke or Rumi,
Whose wisdom illuminates.
I write Free Verse and Haiku,
Sonnets with a smidgen of skill,
Tickle your fancy with dialect,
Make you laugh like Donald McGill.
I am a sandgrownan poet,
They call me a Blackpool Bard.
I write poems for all occasions,
Some I keep and some I discard.
About me
Briefly let me explain who I am and how I got here. After retiring from a long and varied career in publishing, and after filling what my wife insists on calling my “degree-shaped hole”, I went on to study for a Masters in Creative Writing. So began a new life of Brian as a Blackpool Bard.
Some of the poems published here are revisions of poems fromBeside the Seaside, an eclectic collection I published after finishing my Masters. Others are from my second collection, Haiku and Other Poems. And there are essays and an assortment of new poems.
A taste of the range
Four poems, four moods
Reflecting on the work of a famous poet who influenced my work as a writer
I was first introduced to the poetry of T.S. Eliot when a Scottish girlfriend gave me a paperback copy of his ‘Selected Poems’...
Smile for the camera
I found an old photo of you, sitting side-saddle on my Lambretta, smiling a perpetual smile. It triggered a train of thought, returning me to Glasgow Central...
A Government Directive
They dug up the entire footpath,
Marked with coloured chalk,
Put barriers outside our houses,
Signs where we couldn’t walk.
Come and read awhile
Sonnet · Haiku · Free verse · Narrative · Prose poem · Dialect · Shape poem · Nursery rhyme · Essay