Hilary Menos
The New Welsh Review mentions the ‘coarse vitality’ in your latest collection, Red Devon; this is evident from the first poem in the book and gave me the impression that you wanted readers to know from the outset that these would not be bucolic English countryside poems. Was that a concern for you?...
... and saying it. Is too much poetry being published?
Hugo Williams, judging the 147 entries for the Forward Prize 2010, wrote in the Guardian that “an awful lot of them seemed to be published just because they existed, really."...
Cuckoo oats and woodcock hay makes a farmer run away — old Cornish proverb Sugars peak at midsummer then fall as the nights draw in and for the third year in a row we’re entering August with the hay-barn empty but for some bought-in straw and your motorbike wedged in a corner stall. We lose …
We were drinking Icebreakers and Jungle Joes at Nero’s in the meatpacking district, not knowing this was the end of an era. News came in that Boudicca, the British bitch, was dead, wedged in a gorge somewhere on Watling Street, her lines of retreat blocked by her own wagons, her barbarian troops barrel-shot, her bright …
Pushing my trolley today I have Ingomar the barbarian. He is my shopping buddy. He strides through the fresh meat section advising me on barbarian cuisine in the nineteenth century. He is unimpressed by shrink-wrap and buy-one-get-one-free, in fact the whole concept of payment is alien; shopping as raid. I have learned that he likes …
Today I am using a system of triage to allocate – on the basis of need or likely benefit – myself. From trier, to sort. There are those who are likely to live, whatever care they receive, those who are likely to die, whatever care they receive, and those who, with care, might live, and …
