My collection A Fold in the Map is published by Salt in the UK and Jacana in South Africa. You can read more about this and other publications here, along with poems, details of forthcoming readings and the odd snippet of news. My new collection The Tempest Prognosticator will be published in 2011.
Readings - details here.
Next events: Edinburgh Free Fringe Utter Salt Reading, Monday 23 August at The Banshee Labyrinth, Niddry Street, 6.30 - 8.30 pm.
Video of Nelson Mandela Day at the British Museum, 18 July 2010.
Photos from Verbatim Book Store reading, Stellenbosch and news of a visit to Merchant Taylors' School.
Critical Perspective by Alex Pryce on British Council Contemporary Writers Site.
New work in Succour and Staple's film issue, and 'The Buried Butterfly' on Poetry Daily.
Reviews for A Fold in the Map:
The Mail & Guardian (SA)
The Times - one of Elaine Feinstein's books of the year
The Skinning
I watched my older cousin skin a mole:
it seemed a fearsome thing to do, but I was eager
to be big and full of knowledge, so I stayed there,
brave girl, hunkered down, my flowered skirt
rucked up between my summer knees.
The shed’s stone step – his rough autopsy table –
pressed the morning’s gathered heat into my soles,
the same heat rising through the opened body
of the mole. I frowned against the boomerang
of sun, flung, swerving, off the blade at me,
and in the quiet of the early afternoon – the grown-ups
at their ritual naps – the whispering, skrrt-skrrt,
skin peeling back as if from velvet fruit, rasped
louder than the new, enormous thudding of my heart.
No bigger than a mango really, it had fitted in his palm
after the shot, a trophy for his patience, waiting, poised,
brave backyard hunter, ready finger on the trigger lip.
Unsuspecting, it had snuffled to the ceiling of the lawn,
a creature from a picture book, old Mouldiwarp: soft snout,
a pair of small, intrepid claws, a grubby engineer
whose only fault was choosing my aunt’s emerald pride
and joy as his back door. But now it lay as dumb
as fruit, and leaking juice, a thick and sweethot scent
I had to suck my teeth against – but no, I wouldn’t
look away, or pinch my nose, as his brown fingers,
almost priestly, probed the tight-packed inner things.
I watched, and didn’t flinch: his certainty and skill –
and then his sudden, flashing grin, conspiratorial,
as though I wasn’t just a scaredy-cat who couldn’t catch
a ball or swim: I’d crouched to skin a mole with him,
and so I too, accomplice now, was in on his small kill.
From A Fold in the Map