I grew up on the outskirts of London and studied English at Cambridge before teaching in Italy and the UK. I emigrated to Greece in 1979 and worked as a languge teacher and in teacher education before returning in the 1990s. Since 2000 I have lived in London.
I started publishing poetry in the late 1960s, and have published widely in magazines in the UK and USA, including Outposts, Encounter, London Review of Books, TLS, Labrys, Sycamore Press Broadsheets, Poetry Nation Review, Numbers, Southern Review, Verse, and La Fontana.
Collections published include: The Orchard Well, Carcanet 1978; Mountain, Epic and Dream, Hunting Raven 1981; In The New District, Carcanet 1982; Gaining Definition, R L Barth 1986; and two collections, Plain Text, Mica Press 2015, and Long Distance, Mica Press 2020, both still in print.
Rack Press published A Conversation with George Seferis in 2022 and a new collection, Back to Life is due from Mica Press in 2023.
I’ve always been interested in the historical and psychological pressure points of living in a particular place, especially where this involves personal identity. As I have lived and worked for much of my life in other countries, and being part of a bi-cultural family, my writing explores places and people, feelings and experiences, with that perspective. I believe that we constantly explore and recreate such identities, which shift through time and place and language, sometimes happily, and sometimes more tragically. Different approaches require different kinds of poems, and my writing has changed a great deal over time. I now find myself exploring other texts in the same way that I have explored places.
‘The Cave of Androutsos’ was published in PN Review 72. ‘The Goddess’ was published in Numbers 3 and in PNR 100, A Calendar of Modern Poetry. ‘The Crosses’ was published in PNR 100, A Calendar of Modern Poetry. ‘No Place Like It’ was published in PNR 104. The PN Review web site http://www.pnreview.co.uk/ is mostly restricted to subscribers only, but non-subscribers can read some content.
