Ashbery Mode is an anthology of Australian poetry about John Ashbery edited by Michael Farrell. My poem ‘Ninety-Nine Rabbits’ rubs shoulders with works by 68 other poets in the anthology. Hmm, ’68. Coincidence, or …
Continue reading →I’m all set to become a mature-age student!
As a teenaged undergraduate, I lived in a world of blissful ignorance. Two or three lectures a day, a couple of essays to churn out each month, a handful of exams. No biggie. The rest of my life was spent mooching around and listening to UK indie.
Now, 30 years later, I’m set to do something I could never have even contemplated, let alone understood, at that time of my life. At the ripe old age of 47, and as a father of three small children, I’m off to university again.
That’s right, I’m about to become a mature-age student.
Continue reading →Where did the last two months go?
After spending so much time redesigning this website and beginning the long and arduous task of sorting through over 1,000 posts, it’s suddenly been around two months since I last added anything new here!
Where did those two months go?
This is not a rhetorical question, by the way: I genuinely don’t know where they went.
Continue reading →‘Guard these moments well’: the lyrics of Chris de Burgh
We need to talk about Chris de Burgh’s lyrics. Let’s just for a moment pretend that he never wrote ‘The Lady In Red’. Let’s also pretend that ‘Don’t Pay the Ferryman’ was never recorded, let alone ‘a minor hit in the states [sic]’ as alleged on his official website. Indeed, let’s go so far as to say that Chris de Burgh never existed at all.
Okay, perhaps that’s taking things a bit too far.
However if, like me, you grew up on Chris de Burgh’s records, you can probably understand why I get frustrated when people mention those two songs as if that’s all Chris de Burgh ever did.
For the benefit of the vast majority of the world’s population, therefore, I’d like to set the record (no pun intended) straight. In fact, an analysis of Chris de Burgh’s early albums shows that he was already a formidable songwriter. The lyrical prowess demonstrated on ‘Don’t Pay the Ferryman’ was no fluke.
Continue reading →D/DN: Nu på svenska!
Given that I’ve lived in Sweden since 2011, now is probably as good a time as any to acknowledge this fact by creating a Swedish version of my biography.
In addition, given that my chapbook Övergången (2011) contains 10 poems in English and Swedish, I’ve created new posts for the Swedish translations, all of which are listed on the På svenska page.
Thanks once again to Linda Bönström and Boel Schenlaer for providing the translations back in 2011.
I’ve also created a post for my poem ‘Fem kronor’, which is so far the only poem I’ve managed to write in Swedish all on my own, and which originally appeared in my digital chapbook Fem Kronor (2013).
In other Swedish-related news, I’ve recently re-started working on Åsa Strålande in Tantolunden, a novel-in-progress set in Stockholm. While my language skills are definitely basic, I’ve decided to persevere with the original idea of writing the majority of the dialogue in Swedish.
Hmm, time to re-enrol in SFI?