Many refugees keep the keys to their home, hoping to return. This one never will: more and more storms will seed the clouds with birds and might even bring her a husband, but the Atlantic is wider than hope. She seems happy enough here, watched over by the god of three o’clock in the morning… Continue reading A YELLOW-CROWNED NIGHT HERON IN MAYO

Poolbeg Power Station, Dublin The Poolbeg chimneys are two giant barber’s poles still advertising when the shop is closed and the scissors of pollution are blunted. Maybe from two hundred metres up they see beyond the incinerator’s smoke many more decommissionings to come, a cleaner future with nothing like themselves and they will become gigantic… Continue reading Lookouts

Space closes in as time and light narrow,assassinating every imagein the full truth of the pain,its cruel, inexpressible poetry.As the strap around your head bites deeperyou try to recall that other world,the place of calm and darknesswhere dreams waited on luggage racks,but there is only this momentof stark energy with hollowed centre,a neurochemical exoskeletoncarrying the… Continue reading Migraine

I am really pleased to say that my collection THE COLOUR OF EXTINCTION has been chosen by the Observer, one of the leading UK newspapers, as its Poetry Book of the Month. Their review is really positive: “Pulsating with tidal energy…”. If you have not ordered a copy of the collection, you can do so… Continue reading Poetry Book of the Month

You might have thought its batteries were flat, but the drone of disillusion flies  at dusk at dawn at noon. It would have you believe your life is a shred of scattered margins around a collapsed centre under an egg-shaped sun, and that reality is an unreachable cobweb in the past; don’t believe what that… Continue reading Eight Months

There are so many details to choose from, but these are the ones we will notice. Autumn has turned back, but winter walks on in chilly loneliness, a signpost leading to an abandoned garden where fruit trees, once carefully tended, keep producing for as long as they can and the vegetables support the snails that… Continue reading This Evening

Lucky gull chicks on a city roof take food from their parents and snuggle for warmth; for them, life has begun as well as it could. The flightless chick who fell from its nest above and is abandoned by its parents on a hostile gull family’s roof is shut in a large, bright, open room… Continue reading The Longest Day of the Year

Araucania, Chile, 1800 AD This is no job for the young, Melipal; only old women like me will go on using one dream to explain another in this language twisted like dry tree roots. Your five lights have watched us fight the Incas and live and trade with the Spanish and you know I’ve fought… Continue reading Tenth View of the Southern Cross

A clot of bare rocks in Ireland’s bloodstream, the Burren shows a sullen, death-like stare under a sky that offers no relief. From this photo, no one would ever know what once stood there, what secrets hidden before the glaciers stripped it all away. If I ask an AI to imagine details outside the frame,… Continue reading Addition

So now I’ve seen the Northern Lights without shifting from my room. A GPS tracker of my movements would be just a steady blob, a mosquito trapped in amber. Yes, sediment tends to settle, but this feels like identity theft, as if I were a crisis actor dressed in a borrowed costume for a party… Continue reading Predictive Text