Women need to feel loved to have sex. Men need to have sex to feel loved. Someone out there in the Cosmos must be laughing at us.
Billy Connolly
Poetry and film
My two favourite media. My two favourite films are Jacques Tati’s Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Aki Kaurismäki’s La vie de bohème.
Poetry is no more a vocation than good health is.
Boris Pasternak Dr Zhivago
I started writing poetry when I was 11 and haven’t stopped yet. Marilyn Hacker and Zbigniew Herbert were early influences; Geoffrey Hill and August Kleinzahler more recent ones.
I particularly admire Christopher Logue’s retelling of The Iliad. Recently I came across collections by New Yorker Kate Light, hard to find but worth looking out for.