Tell us about yourself and what inspired you to start writing.
I live in Oxford with my Italian wife and two sons. But I was born on the edge of the Forest of Dean, In England, near the Welsh border. I studied English at Oxford University and then moved to Dublin to write a PhD thesis on Wallace Stevens. Eventually I moved back to Oxford, undertaking gardening and library work, until I began tutoring art history and English literature at various colleges in the city. My most recent poems come out of my life here in Oxford, witnessing the birth and early years of my two sons. In many ways my children are the “Cherubims” of my new collection as much as that word signifies the guards of Eden in Genesis or the wheeled living creatures in Ezekiel. My previous collection presented 150 poems in conversation with the Psalms, so you can see the Bible has also been a source of inspiration for me.
Describe your writing process? Is there anything unique about it?
I tend to wake very early and write in the small hours of the morning before my family gets up. I can only sustain two or three hours of poetry writing a day really, the process is so intense, although it might look sometimes like I am daydreaming on my couch. Since I write according to the “dance music of the ages”, as Yeats would say, using rhyme and metre, the process of writing and re-writing can be quite arduous. A stanza can take me hours or days maybe, although very occasionally a poem comes fully formed. I have stacks of pads of rough drafts.
Have you published any books or do you have a desire to do so?
My previous collection of poems is called A Book of Psalms and was published in 2020. The poems here are numbered according to the arrangement of psalms in the Masoretic Text and the King James Version of the Bible. These poems are not translations or versifications. Mostly they are conversations with, sometimes even hesitations about, the ancient texts. You may understand them as slightly unruly imitations, transplantations, or poems in their own right. The making of the whole book felt like an initiation, and I came to understand The Book of Psalms to be structured as a cave in the Old Testament.
My second son was born when I started writing A Book of Psalms in earnest, and he and his brother grew up in that book. After finishing my psalms, I was prompted to write some more poems about my two small sons, and these pieces form the nucleus of my most recent collection, Cherubims, in which I confront in contemplative thought those fiery guards of Eden and the Holy of Holies: the chariot-like sphinges or living creatures of Ezekiel, who seem to reappear in Revelation, and who are so full of knowledge of God in their purified form in Dionysius.
A selection of my poems, called The Voice inside Our Home, was published at the beginning of 2022 by SLG Press. I am also the author of two books of criticism, The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry (Iff Books, 2014).
Do you have any favorite poets or authors?
Beyond Shakespeare and Milton, my favourite poets are George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. My late tutor at Oxford was the great-great-great nephew of William Wordsworth, and perhaps that is why I have such a fondness for that Romantic poet, along with William Cowper and William Blake. I do also love reading twentieth century poets such as Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, and Philip Larkin. When I read contemporary poetry, I tend to linger longest over the work of Jamie McKendrick, A. E. Stallings, Ernest Hilbert, and Ned Denny.
Do you have a favorite book of poetry or poems?
I am most absorbed by the Bible and ancient poetry, and things like Plato’s dialogues, Plotinus’ Enneads, Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy, Meister Eckhart’s sermons, tracts and essays by Frithjof Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, and H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and the OED.
What are you reading now?
At the moment, before I sleep at night, I am lazily re-reading the second volume of Roy Foster’s biography of Yeats, The Arch-Poet, when I really should be re-reading St Augustine’s City of God. I’ve been halfway through the Complete Poems of Hardy since the end of the summer, I just recently bought the Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, thinking I’ll work through the fascicles as she left them, and I’m one poem into A. E. Stallings’ Selected Poems. I am continually re-reading Shakespeare and many other older and more recent poets with students when I teach in the day.
What do you like to do when you’re not writing? Full-time job, pets, hobbies?
During term time, I spend much of my day walking through fields and streets of Oxford, between the colleges where I teach. When we’re in Italy, I like to saunter in the Alps, sip negronis on the riviera, and drink fine wine over long lunches. My children still take up quite a lot of my time.
Are you working on a current project?
Beyond poetry, my new art history book, The Secret Mind of Art, is due to go into production in April. One of these days I will write a book on Shakespeare and esoteric occult Neoplatonism.
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