CONTENTS

Learning to Read

Bye Bye Black Sheep

Tramp Tramp Tramp

Hearts and Flowers

What Happened to Henry

What Happened to Dorothy

The Fallen Birdman

‘What does your father do?’

Having My Ears Boxed

Another Brick in the Wall

How to Become a Sixer

Spitting Prohibited

A Fine Tooth Comb

Vague Impressions

George and the Dragonfly

Snowing Down South

Man the Barricades, the Enemy has let loose his Pyjamas!

Poem on being in love with two girls at the same time

Comeclose and Sleepnow

A lot of Water has Flown under your Bridge

Aren’t We All

after the merrymaking, love?

The Act of Love

My little plastic mac

Who was The Naughty Girl

Sundeath/greentears

If life’s a lousy picture, why not leave before the end

You and Your Strange Ways

The sun no longer loves me

On having no one to write a love poem about

Why Patriots are a Bit Nuts in the Head

Icarus Allsorts

Three Rusty Nails

Mother the Wardrobe is Full of Infantrymen

On Having a First Book of Poetry Published (The day the world ended.)

Let me Die a Youngman’s Death

SUMMER WITH MONIKA

Summer with the Monarch

Amateur traumatics

McGough’s last stand

10 Ways to Make a Killing on the Stock Market

All Over bar the Shouting

The Perfect Crime

Three weeks ago we decided to go our separate ways

Holiday on Death Row

Goodbat Nightman

P.C. Plod at the Pillar Box

P.C. Plod in Love

The Sergeant gets a handsome deal

P.C. Plod versus the Youth International Party

Cardiff 11 a.m.

Poem for National LSD Week

9 to 5 (or cosy biscuit)

Conversation on a Train

SPORTING RELATIONS:

Cousin Caroline

Albert Robinson

Aunt Ermintrude

Wild Bill Sitting Bull

Dear Lonely Hearts

Merve the Swerve

Terry and Pancho

Uncle Trevor and Aunty Penny

Accrington Stan

The Hon. Nicholas Frayn

Is My Team Playing

Poem for the opening of Christ the King Cathedral, Liverpool, 1967

Catching up on Sleep

Waving at Trains

Dawnmare on 24th St

Incident at a Presidential Garden Party

There’s Something Sad

What the Littlegirl Did

The horse’s mouth

Poor Old Dead Horses

My Busconductor

My Busseductress

The Hippopotamusman

Just another Autumn day

The Last Strike

Conservative Government Unemployment Figures

A Fair Day’s Fiddle

out of sequence

UNLUCKY FOR SOME

Water, Tree, Cave, Mother

The Wreck of the Hesperus

There are fascists

There Was a Knock on the Door. It Was the Meat.

and the field screamed ‘TRACTOR’

The One About the Duck

Honey and Lemon

Five Ways to Help You Pass Safely through a Dark Wood Late at Night

a cat, a horse and the sun

Trees Cannot Name the Seasons

Conservation Piece

Crocodile in the City

Five-car Family

Stop All the Cars

Stinging in the Rain

The City of London Tour

Fatal Consequences

Bad Day at the Ark (i)–(iv)

St Francis and the Lion (i)–(ii)

The Father, the Son

Old-fashioned Values

The Jogger’s Song

The Terrible Outside

The End of Summer

A Brown Paper Carrierbag

The Identification

A Cautionary Calendar

Funny sort of bloke

Good Old William

War of the Roses

What My Lady Did

W.P.C. Marjorie Cox

Poem for a Lady Wrestler

Who Can Remember Emily Frying?

The Tallest Man in Britain

Laughing, all the way to Bank

As Every Bandage Dreams

Your Favourite Hat

Today is Not a Day for Adultery

Fits and Starts

Dialectically Opposed

The Examination

The Poet Takes an Autumnal Stroll on Hampstead Heath

Creative Writing

Meeting the Poet at Victoria Station

Take a Poem, Miss Smith

An Ordinary Poetry Reading

After the Reading

The Logic of Meteors

His poems are nets

A Critic Reviews the Curate’s Egg

The Nearest Forty-two

The Written Word

On the Point of Extinction

The death of John Berryman in slow motion

One Poet May Hide Another

A Visit to the Poet and his Wife

All for Laurie Lee

This be Another Verse

The Darling Buds of Maybe

From ‘Les Pensées’ by Le Duc de Maxim

Trust Me, I’m a Poet

For Want of a Better Title

It’s Only a P…

It’s Only a P… Part Two

Coach and Horses

Poem for a dead poet

Repelled by Metal

The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse

I Don’t Like the Poems

This is One of Those

The Battle of Bedford Square

For the Sake of Argument

The Newly Pressed Suit

The Revenge of My Last Duchess

How Patrick Hughes Got to be Taller

The Boyhood of Raleigh

Children’s Writer

Joinedupwriting

A Literary Riddle

What prevents a poem from stretching into Infinity?

THE SPOTTED UNICORN

Rabbit in Mixer Survives

A Joy to be Old

In Good Spirits

Nothing Ventured

Bees Cannot Fly

My Life in the Garden

The Perfect Place

Where It’s At

Clutching at Cheese Straws

Melting into the Foreground

Ode on a Danish Lager

Another Mid-life Crisis

Early-Morning Poems

Shavings Account

Prayer to Saint Grobianus

Fired with Enthusiasm

In Case of Fire

Vague Assumptions

It’s a Jungle Out There

Don’t Read All About It

Everyday Eclipses

The Bright Side

The Unknown Worrier

Dressed for the Occasion

You may get the vote at eighteen, but you’re born with a price on your head

My Shadow is but a Shadow of Its Former Self

Science, where are you?

Poem with a Limp

The Health Forecast

Bob Dylan and the Blue Angel

A Bolt from the Blue

Thank U Very Much

My Divine Juggler

Echoes Sound Afar

The Man in the Moon

Defying Gravity

The Trouble with Snowmen

Four Sons (A Wish)

Who are These Men?

The Way Things Are

Index of First Lines

Index of Sources