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These 50 poems in Love and a Life, written between September and November 2002, are celebrations and elegies for "Frank, Jean, Cosgrove, John, Malcolm, Mark – loves of sixty years", for brief actual or unrealised relationships, and for lovers encountered through literature: Ovid exiled in Thrace, Tatyana from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin composing her effusive but vain declaration of love, and her near namesake Titania from A Midsummer Night's Dream who wants only "to cuddle her cuddy, to / dawdle with her donkey". The sequence ends:

There is so much to say
And who can delay
When some are lost and some are seen, our dearest
heads, and to those and to these we must still
answer and be true.

Written in an original, heavily-rhymed eight-line verse form mixing very short and very long lines, the sequence was included in full in A Book of Lives (Carcanet, 2007).

Love And A Life

2000s

These 50 poems in Love and a Life, written between September and November 2002, are celebrations and elegies for "Frank, Jean, Cosgrove, John, Malcolm, Mark – loves of sixty years" …

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