About Religious poetry, from Horace & friends (Victoria Moul) -
- Why is it that so many of the best contemporary poets in English are (broadly speaking) religious? In the US (but not in the UK), there’s a recognised tendency for “formalist” poets to be religious, especially Roman Catholic.
- the average highly-fêted poetry collection is now much more shallowly rooted in the literary culture than used to be the case, and that high-profile UK poets, in particular, now quite often sound like imitation-US poets, without the roots in the distinctive American tradition to be heard in the best American writers.
- Scripture and liturgy are, in literary terms, a shared canon.
- religious practice may also offer at least some sort of encounter with another linguistic world. ... The pronounced monolingualism of much Anglophone culture is also extremely unusual, historically and geographically, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s doing its poetry much good.
Victoria Moul and Hilary Menos discuss 'The Gathering' by Partridge Boswell, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Competition (from The friday poem) -
- Victoria: I’ll be blunt and say I think it’s a terrible poem. It seems to me to have almost all the vices of the typical ‘poetry magazine’ poem and no real redeeming features
- Hilary: feels like borrowed ballast ... it’s virtue signalling ... Lots of big league references, but so little feeling.
- Victoria: I have lost confidence at this point that the poet has really thought about his references.
Back in the 1990s I managed to photograph a bird flying along il ponte vecchio (it's just above the people's heads).
Near Potter's Bar, this stone is on a piece of grass. It reads "Near this spot at 3.30 in the afternoon of September 15th 1784, Vicenzo Lunardi, the Italian balloonist, made his first landing whilst on his pioneer flight in the English atmosphere. Having handed out a cat and dog, the partners of his flight from London, he re-ascended and continued north-eastward."
This is the "great globe" in Swanage, Dorset. It was made in Greenwich in 1887.
It features an eroded Italy
In a Swanage restaurant I went to the toilet and saw this air freshener - showing where I was married. 
This dates from 1993, before the euro. I brought it home as a souvenir. 
This was my local laundrette long ago. My wife-to-be and I used to go there on our early dates. I'm amazed it's still open.
This cinema closed down before I arrived in Cambridge. I think it was opposite St Barnabas church, but I'm not sure
The Bath House opened in 1927. The area was poor, so the baths were an important amenity. In 1969 a sauna was added. In 1975 a bath cost 10p to the public, but the real cost was £1.09, so it became a centre for community groups. It's still running. I spent many happy Saturday mornings there in the Friends of the Earth office. See my 
20th March. I listened to novelists Megan Hunter, Burhan Sonmez, Sarvat Hasin, Rebecca Birrell, Yvonne Battle-Felton, Joe Mungo Reed and Sam Sussman, followed by poets Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Adam Crothers, Bhanu Kapil and Angela Leighton. Novelists often interviewed each other. Many interesting points were made. Here are a few -
John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress while he was imprisoned in Bedford jail. I've not visited his museum yet.
Matt Riches, Matthew Stewart et al at St. Albans.
Anne Berkeley et al at CB1, Cambridge.
A.E. Stallings (The Oxford Professor of Poetry) at Trinity, Cambridge.
This scene was outside King's College Cambridge yesterday. Typewriter at the ready, the poet offers the public a "Poem on the Spot". No AI.
Today I went to Huntingdon, about 30km from Cambridge. They have an alley of murals I didn't know about, featuring T.S. Eliot, William Cowper, Lucy Maria Boston, Henry of Huntingdon, George Herbert and Samuel Pepys.
Here's the Eliot wall. Little Gidding is about 15km from Huntingdon.
My story collection "By All Means" (ISBN 978-0-9570984-9-7), published by Nine Arches Press, is on sale from 
My poetry pamphlet "Moving Parts" (ISBN 978-1-905939-59-6) is out now, on sale at the 
