Highlights

Poetry

Sphinx Unloosed

Part 5 — Cabaret

Part 11 — Outfit

Other

Hymn to Light

Language

Prepositions and Affixes:

Part 18 Delulu is the Solulu

Part 17 A Wan Thing

Grammar:

Gender and Genre

A Bit of a Handful

Food and Cooking

Nine-a-Day Veggie Ratatouille

Nine-a-day Vegetarian Brazilian Feijoada — Black Bean Stew

Translations

Franics Ponge: L’ eau

Propertius III.i

POETRY, POLITICS, AND LANGUAGE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Original Poetry

Series

Sphinx Unloosed (2025-2026)

Parts 1 and 2 — Prologue and Zoochosis

Part 3 — Sphinx

Part 4 — Tec

Part 5 — Cabaret

Part 6 — Knife # 1

Part 7 — Putsch

Part 8 — Crime Scene

Part 9 — Kanzler

Part 10 — Antichrist

Part 11 — Outfit

Part 12 — Knife #2

Part 13 — Bild

The Chancellor and the Songstress (2020-2021)

Prologue

Part 1 The Tale of Lily-White Riotess

Part 2 Hymn to the Flora of the World

 Part 3 The Balloonists

 Part 4 The Little Drummer Boy

 Part 5 The Toppling of the Chairman of the Board

Part 6 Interlude — Dumbo in Cuckooland

Part 7 The Lion Unloosed

Epilogue— The Baby Song and the Baobab Tree

17 (2017-2018)

Section 1 – Prologue – Selva Oscura

Sections 2 and 3 – Picnic and Gas

Section 4 — Bangers Section 5 – Fall

Section 6 – She Section 7 – Park

Section 8 – Dogs             Section 9 – Siren

Section 10 – Dot Section 11 – Dorothy Agonistes

Section 12 – Mower

Sections 13 and 14 – Mike and Michael Angel

Section 15 – Psychopomp

Sections 16 and 17 – Purgatorio and Epilogue

64 (1991-2016)

Section 1 – Part 1 Prologue

Section 2 – Epithalamium—Parts 2 – 3 

Section 3 – Ekphrasis Parts 4 – 8

Section 3 – Ekphrasis – Parts 9 and 10

Section 4 – Katabasis – Parts 11-17

Section 4 – Katabasis – Parts 18-23

Section 5 – Honeymoon – Parts 24-26

Section 5 – Honeymoon – Parts 27-29 

Epilogue Parts 30-35  

Sonnets on Autism (2003)

# 6, # 7, # 8

# 9

# 18, # 19, # 20, # 21, # 22

200 (2018-2020)

Section 1 – Prologue – Part 1

Section 1 – Prologue – Part 2 – Mental Arithmetic

Section 1 – Prologue – Part 3

Section 2 – Witness

Sections 3 and 4 – Newcomer – Miasma

Section 5 – Breakfast, Dinner, Tea

Section 6 – Jude

Section 7 – Kseniya and Zhenya                                             

Section 8 – Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dee

Section 9 – Duet

Section 10 – Hymn to Liberty

Section 11 – Song for the Opium Poppy

Sections 12, 13 and Intermission

Section 14 – Checkmate – Kseniya and Zhenya do the CIA

Section 15 – When Tweedle Dumb met Tweedle Dee

Section 16 – Hymn to Ammunition

Section 17 Porton Down

Section 18 Yu Home

Section 19 – Jessie Down

Section 20 – Magic Act – Kseniya and Zhenya do Las Vegas

Section 21 – Potpourri

Section 22 – Bella

Section 23 – Bell at Seven Part 1

Section 23 – Bell at Seven Part 2

Section 24 Part 1 – Kseniya and Zhenya do Sunset Boulevard

Section 24 Part 2 – Zhenya Arrested

Section 25 – The Chancellor and the Fox

Section 26 – Meeting

Section 27 – Zhenya does Yellowstone

Section 28 — Epilogue Parts 1-3

Unholy Sonnets (2001)

 # 1, # 17, # 19

Collections

I Things Drawn from the Earth (1989-1992)

Young Carrots

The Desk Lamp

Flints

Your Freckles

The Refrigerator

The Kitchen Garden

The Word Mud

The Pavement

Yeast

II Held in the Air (1993-1997)

The Balloon

Bridge and Ford

Coconuts 

Descent

Electricity Pylons

How to Describe a River

Nostalgia

III A Mind of Winter (1998-1999)

Summer Winter

IV Inferno in a Teaspoon (2000-2001)

Brides

The Butterfly

Expurosis

Honey

New Moon

Poem

Sunday Evening

VI Elegy for a Punk Nightingale (2003)

 Hymn to Sleep

 Ode to Oedipus

Propertius Elegies III.iv

Propertius Elegies III.v

Propertius Elegies III.vi

VII The Filth in the Machine (2002005)

Family Night Out

Hallowe’en

Hymn to Home

Hymn to Neptune

Propertius Elegies III.xxi

VIII Fragments of Affairs (2006-2011)

Dona Cecília Wants an iPhone

Pastoral

Stuff Picked up at the Supermarket

Young Women in a Coffee Shop

X Seeing through Fog (2015)

Ovid Amores I.ix

Burning Questions

Candle

The Caterpillar

Couldn’t

Daylight Hours

Expo 1851

Epic

First Crush

Expo 1893

The Little Auto

A Little Metaphysical Haiku

The Lizard

Lucy

Mangoes Growing

Moment

Hymn to the Moon

Morning Rain

Paraklausithyron

Pollution

Renaissance

The River Biss

The Rope

School through Fog

Stack

Stuff Stuffed in a Drawer

Sugar

Ode to Thread

Throwing the Postman out of the Pram

Wake

Wind Eye

Urban Haikus

X Fun and Suffering (2016-2019)

April

Care

Chang’e

Conspiracies

Cycle

Luzia in Flame

May Day

Outpatients

Parkland Requiem Chorus

Prince Henry Does the Cape

Red Cross on White

Ron Doe

Saltire

Satellite

Stars

The Street

Ubiquity Rags (2020- )

Hymn to Light

Hymn to Ubiquitin

The Pavement (2024)

View

Other Translations

Francis Ponge

Fragments of a Nanny Goat

L’ eau

João Cabral de Melo Neto

 A Blade With No Handle

The Hen’s Egg

Manuel Bandeira

 The Caterpillar

Rainer Maria Rilke

  Duino Elegy # 4

Pindar

First Nemean Ode

Publius Ovidius Naso

Amores I.ix

Sextus Propertius

Elegies III.i

Elegies III.iii

Experimental Poetry

Habeas Corpus

Birth Year Words Poems

Prose

Short Stories

The Street

Novel

Sally in the Woods Chapter 1

Essays

Needs Analysis

Second Post First

Fifty Years On

History and Psychology

Ten Differences Between Britain and Brazil

A Tragedy in Brazil

Black Friday

The Point of Killing

Decisions, Decisions

Angiogram

Five Types of Taxi Driver

Tattoo

Literary Criticism

The Ghost of Philip Larkin

The Lizard and the Caterpillar

Encavernment in Beckett, Musil, and Kafka

William Carlos Williams in the American Grain

Amateur and Professional Poetry

Why Poetry Didn’t Go Dada

John Berryman and the Male Gaze

Mower Poems

Dogme in Poetry and Film Part I

Dogme in Poetry and Film Part II

Why I Write

The Space of Writing

Creative Idleness

Sylvia Plath’s Full Stops

What Makes Literature Good

Why Poetry Didn’t Go Indie

Moonset in Walt Whitman

Advice to Young Poets

The Devil in the em-dash: a reading of Emily Dickinson

The Yogh of Truth Part 2 — A Reading of Emily Dickinson #1263

Language

Series

For the Love of Prepositions (and Affixes)

Part 1 At

Part 2 By

Part 3 The F-words: ‘of’ and ‘off’

Part 4 Back and Forth

Part 5 To be or not to be…

Part 6 On ‘on’…

Part 7 And…

Part 8 …but

Part 9a Games with ge-, y- and a-

Part 9b Playing the Language Game

Part 10a -ob

Part 10b ob-

Part 11 Till Death Us Do Part

Part 12 Coronavirus

Part 13 For it is sweet…

Part 14 Round and Around

Part 15 Re- and -wer

Part 16 Inter Alia

Part 17 A Wan Thing

Part 18 Delulu is the Solulu

Number and Quantifiers                       

A Bit of a Handful

A Number of Issues Regarding Number

Plurality in Question               

Modal Verbs

Modal Verbs of Obligation Part 1 — have to and need (to)

Modal Verbs over Time

Modal Verbs in the News

Managing Capacity – Modal Verbs in the Real World

If he wins…

The Truth about English Verbs

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4a

Other             

Miscellaneous

Gender and Genre

Alphabet Soup

Grammar

Governor Brewer’s Present Perfect

De-escalation and the Nature of the English Language

Grammar Lessons from Antonin Scalia

(Our) Words of the Year

Fluidity of Person

The Genuine Article

Ergativity in Trump White House Discourse

Vocabulary

Buzzword Origins

#2 Words that Deliver

#1 On Board

What Spelling Tells Us

Food for Thought

Lists      

Hope and Speed

Pronunciation

The Yogh of Truth Part 1

The Politics of Stress

Punctuation

Between Quotes

Teaching and Tests

Testing Tests

Creative Idleness

Poorsplaining and True Education

Sheep and Goats

Life in the UK

Politics and Society

     General

Know Your Rights

 Democracy as Alternation in Britain, France, the US, and Brazil

Laudable Pus

International

Learning from Ukraine

China, Russia, and the United States

Greece in Europe

Syriza and the SNP

The Sweet Inception of War

Catalonia, Scotland, and Kurdistan

UK Politics

UK Election — 27 Years Ago and Now

How not to Miselect a Government

Victory in Defeat

The Voter’s Dilemma

The British Labour Party and Scottish Independence

US

Piers Morgan’s Guns

Honey and Bile: The Rhetoric of Sarah Palin

Ergativity in Trump White House Discourse

The Politics of Stress

If he wins…

Brazil

A Democratic Coup

What is going on in Brazil

Throwing the Bloody Book at Them

Beer in Brazil

Other Topics

Food and Cooking

Nine-a-Day Veggie Ratatouille

Nine-a-day Vegetarian Brazilian Feijoada — Black Bean Stew

Math and Science

Markov Chains

TV and Film

Death of a Clown

Genre Shift in Film and TV

Dogme in Poetry and Film Part I

Popular Music

Billy Bragg, the Smiths, and Eminem

Voice and Song – Part 1

Lucifer Falls over Lancashire

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash