What I am working on at the moment...

A Map of my Poems

Places can act as a guide to understand the genesis of a piece of writing.

Having lived in France (twice), Ireland (twice), the UK (twice) and Italy (once, unfortunately), I firmly believe that my poems have been shaped by the places where they emerged in many ways, even when the actual location is not the subject matter. As Vahni Capildeo writes in her Venus as a Bear, "one place belongs with the poem". This is a list of my published poems and "where they belong":

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THE BASQUE COUNTRY

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• "Krieg"

• "Tales of the Woodcock"

• "Sotto il Mare"

• "A Modern Watercolour"

• "Shapes from the Past"

• "Etxe"

• "The Basque Witch Hunt, 1610"

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SPAIN

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Granada and its surroundings

• "Requiem for Lorca"

• "Soledad Montoya"

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FRANCE

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• "The Spanish Maids"

• "First Phone"

• "Haunted by Houses"

• "This is How Joan Petit Dances"

• "Divine Séraphine"

• "A Zen Rumination"

• "The Fall of the West"

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Paris

• "Only the Unemployed Have Time to Watch the Snow Falling"

• “Pikachu in the Musée d’Orsay”

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Versailles​

• "M.A.: a French Sonnet"

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ENGLAND

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• "A Living Doll"

• "My Cricket Kids"

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London

• "Alma Mater Studio Room"

• "The Frenchwomen of Fulham"

• "Memento Mori in Highgate Cemetery"

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ITALY

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Bologna

• "Magdalenian"

• "On Cooking Krakens"

• "Humoral Medicine"

• "Bologna"

Florence

• "Best Portrait"

Genoa

• "Sotto il Mare"

Rome

• "Tiresias and Moses"

• "The Via Appia Catacombs"

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Trieste

• "Treasuring Trieste"

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Venice

• "Three Other Ways to Look at Venice"

Verona

• "Juliet's Chest"

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IRELAND

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Bantry

• "Sotto il Mare"

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Dublin

• "Drunken Roses"

• "The Black Butterflies"

• "The Argentinian Rugbywomen"

Howth

• "On Painting an Irish Seaside Resort"

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ARGENTINA

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• "Amerikanoa"

• "The Wandering Basque"

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Other unpublished poems draw inspiration from Biarritz, Zugarramurdi, the Aquitaine and Occitanie regions, Sevilla, Navarra, Paris, Wiltshire, Somerset, Naples, Perugia, Siena, Ravenna, Dalkey, Belfast, Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Winchester, Canterbury, Lourdes, Devon, Narbonne...

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My Favourite Visual Artists

My trip to Italy last January was invigorating. It reminded me how much visual arts matter to me, both as a writer and on a personal level. I wanted to share with you a list of the painters, sculptors and movements who inspire me and lift my spirits up:

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• Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman art

• Italian Renaissance artists

• Sandro Botticelli

• Michelangelo

• Hans Holbein

• Il Caravaggio

• The Pre-Raphaelites (especially John Everett Millais, John William Waterhouse and Edward Burne-Jones)

• Camille Claudel

• Gustav Klimt

• Frida Kahlo

• Salvador Dalí 

• Charlotte Salomon

• Pop-surrealism

My 2019 Reading List

• Six Basque Poets: Rikardo Arregi, Bernardo Atxaga, Felipe Juaristi, Miren Agur Meabe, Kirmen Uribe, Joseba Sarrionandia - Arc Publications (Poetry)

• Flèche - Mary Jean Chan (Poetry)

• Les ronces - Cécile Coulon (Poetry) 

• Une bête au paradis - Cécile Coulon (Novel) 

• Elias Portolu - Grazia Deledda (Novel)

• The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan (Essay)

• Le voci della sera (English: Voices in the Evening) - Natalia Ginzburg (Novel)

• Tutti i nostri ieri (English: All Our Yesterdays) - Natalia Ginzburg (Novel)

• The Fifties Mystique - Jessica Mann (Memoir)

• Le Bal - Irène Némirovsky (Novella)

• Les chiens et les loups (English: The Dogs and the Wolves)  - Irène Némirovsky (Novel)

• David Golder - Irène Némirovsky (Novel)

• "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom" - Sylvia Plath (Short Story)

• Spikenard - Yvonne Reddick (Poetry)

• Translating Mountains - Yvonne Reddick (Poetry)

• Songs My Enemy Taught Me - Joelle Taylor (Poetry)

• Tea With Cardamom - Warda Yassin (Poetry)

My 2018 Reading List

(These books haven't necessarily been published in 2018)

• Suite Française - Irène Némirovsky

• In Other Words - Jhumpa Lahiri

• Honour - Elif Shafak

• La Ragazza di Bube (English: Bebo's Girl) - Carlo Cassola

• A Hurry of English - Mary Jean Chan

• The Cloven Viscount - Italo Calvino

• The Periodic Table - Primo Levi

• The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi

• The Republic of Motherhood - Liz Berry

• La main coupée (English: The Bloody Hand) - Blaise Cendrars

• Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi

• Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? - Jeanette Winterson

• The Solitude of Prime Numbers - Paolo Giordano

• The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956 – 1963 - Sylvia Plath

• How to be a Poet - Jo Bell, Jane Commane et. al.

• The Perseverance - Raymond Antrobus