Free verse, 2026

I liked the Poetry Society's Free Verse event on April 25th, where dozens of small press publishers had stalls. One of the talks was "AI in Poetry and Translation".

I bought "A Z-hearted guide to heartache" by Charley Barnes (V.press, 2018), "checkout" by Kathy Gee (V.press, 2019), "This Lexia & other languages" by Helen Kay (V.press, 2020), and was given "Patterns in the dust" (Foyles Young Poets of the year anthology, 2025), "Always another twist" by Sarah Leavesley (Mantle Lane Press, 2018), and "Kaleidoscope" by Sarah Leavesley (Mantle Lane Press, 2017).

I popped into the LRB bookshop too, buying "One sun only" by Camille Bordas - short stories (Serpent's tail, 2026).

Pizzas of the world

Spain. Somebody has tried to cross out the Hawaii pizza

South of Dublin

Cambridge

Swanage and history, 2026

Hardy called Swanage Knollsea. In this photo there's a concrete pillbox, crab and lobster pots, and a folly from London. The ships that took Portland stone to London were ballasted with odds and ends for the return journey - bollards, etc.

This "Great Globe", on the edge of Swanage dates from the 1870s. It's about 3m in diameter and was made in Greenwich.

Dancing Ledge is a terrace of rock that's covered at high tide. A cuboid hole was cut into it to make a swimming pool. My mother's school used it to teach the children how to swim. I never saw my mother swim.

When this shop was Woolworths there was a ballroom on the first floor. My parents met there. My cousin owns the shop now. Their storeroom is upstairs.

These Dinosaur prints are in a field far from anywhere.

Religious poetry, and a review of a prize winning poem

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.

Italy - Florence, Potter's Bar, Swanage and ice-creams

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.

Mill Road, Cambridge

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 Bath House notes for details.

Hughes Hall Literary Day 2026

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 -

• Burham Sonmez mentioned that Marquez turned down lucrative Hollywood contracts on aesthetic grounds. 10 years after his death his sons did a deal with NetFlix.
• Sarvat Hasin talked about long-term friendships - how Ferrante's written about them; how the codes of conduct aren't clear (how can you end them?)
• Joe Mungo Reed said that his advice to students is sometimes "Too much stuff! Just tell a story!" - advice which struck a chord with me.
• Adam Crothers (partly tongue in cheek?) said he'd discovered subject matter.
• There was quite a lot of discussion about auto-fiction and "truth".