Yorkshire Times Article: Goole Revisited

As a child in the sixties, I lived and played down Jefferson Street in the Port of Goole. Home was handily placed for an unpaid job as ball boy with the town’s football team at The Pleasure Grounds. We could hear the busy railway lines that ran from Kingston Upon Hull to Doncaster (the same…

Words …

Fledge … a misplaced blurb: The collection of poems under the title ‘Fledge’ begins with a reflection on how a wild urban childhood and encounters with nature in adolescence have resonated in adult life. There is a strong nature theme running through the poems including a curlew with a grudge, a sceptical mouse, the perils…

A Goole Thing

Hello Humber gateway, you old dock drab, winking at passing commerce with your ample warehouse acreage, welcoming skirts hitched up the legs of the Ouse and Trent. Under stretched skies, I am a salmon swimming the sixty-two, past rotting coal fired corpses, where orderly pylons queue the lanes, sturdy girls whispering indiscretions; gossip from a…

A coffee between two rivers

Still adjusting to part-time teaching, I thought I’d indulge myself with a poetry purchase from those lovely folk at Maytree Press and use my newly acquired freedom to read it at what has become a favourite coffee haunt in Kendal, About Time Espresso Bar down the New Shambles. The book in question is between two…

Goole Revisited

Hello Humber Gateway, you old dock drab, winking at passing commerce with your ample warehouse acreage, welcoming skirts hitched up the legs of the Ouse and Trent. Under stretched skies, I am a salmon swimming the sixty-two, past rotting coal fired corpses, where orderly pylons queue the lanes, sturdy girls whispering old secrets; gossip from…