Need a new author photo for some books. Might get a photographer ths time, as my arm is not long enough to get eno8ugh soft focus with selfies. MEANWHILE, here's another slightly belated halloween pick, because I vant to suck your buuuuuhd.

Summer book 8: Ginnel by Lucy Newlin: rich Yorkshire childhood poems, dense in consonants and tight squat square structures; pleasingly full of wonder and regional diction and a few hard edges in there to trouble the rosiness of choldhood.

Summer Book 7; Poetry as a state of wold loneliness, a harrowed, hollowed physical mourning at one with herons, a widow with a broken bottle. This rawness good; my favourites play with sound and form tightly too. Kerry Hardie, The Zebra Stood in the Night

Oswald's Falling Awake. No 4 but late. As always, it's like talking with a druid in the languages of rocks and locusts- holy and thing-voiced. Also, as ever with Oswald, actively trying to break the limits of what a book can be. Poetry as experimental space

Summer book 5. Took my time getting to this. Arch; disruptive; queer; intelligent. Some essays, mostly poems - and the poems excellent: the fruit poems (there are many) my favourite, as they manage to be wholly tactile/disruptively theoretical at the same time

Summer Book the Third, the latest Caroline Bird. If you've not read her, she's a sure thing - even for a non-poetry reader - every poem clear as mineral water, sit-com funny but with a steep existential lurch of the heart somewhere in each poem. Like a series of mini Twilight Zones

Summer book two. Unself-conciously English; capable of great emotional depth - Entropy one of many standout poems; often quiet to the point of demureness ( two poems on mice, two on Mary Poppins) but all the more original for it- muchos gracias, Senore Watts.

Holiday book one. Fantastic squelchy music: a gorgeous dirty book of poems, all bonfires and slabbers and tight consonantal play: well done, McKendry

Just finished this. A tale of Modern England, from 90s optimism to Brexit and Covid, brought to life with billionaires, spies and rekindled marriages. Quite excellent

Fancy a preorder? First sighting of my new wee book in the wild. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/806932...

Nonsense-poem with Class 1 from Glasson Dock Primary - the words theirs, bad handwriting mine. About an ice-cream monster. I like the rhyme of brainfreeze/Sainsburys at the end.

Wee interview about The Gospel of Orla on the wonderful Deborah Kalbs's fantastic blog. deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2025/05/q-wi...

Noo website. For noo books coming out this year. eoghanwalls.co.uk

Live scenes from the Heard and McDonald Islands stock exchange this morning. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBk9...

Noo hedd.

My 5 year old keeps asking what'll happen after she dies. Dad of three, used to this question, I spell out her options; a) heaven, b) hell, c) reincarnation, d) nothingness, like sleep. I THOUGHT she had early existential angst; actually, she's just excited to be reincarnated as a reindeer.

Had a bday at the weekend. My 13 year old painted my favourite animal.