What I am working on at the moment...
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The launch of Whalers, Witches and Gauchos!

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":
THE BASQUE COUNTRY
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"Krieg"
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"Tales of the Woodcock"
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"Sotto il Mare"
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"A Modern Watercolour"
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"Shapes from the Past"
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"Etxe"
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"The Basque Witch Hunt, 1610"
SPAIN
Granada and its surroundings
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"Requiem for Lorca"
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"Soledad Montoya"
FRANCE
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"First Phone"
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"Haunted by Houses"
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"This is How Joan Petit Dances"
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"Divine Séraphine"
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"A Zen Rumination"
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"The Fall of the West"
Paris
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"Only the Unemployed Have Time to Watch the Snow Falling"
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“Pikachu in the Musée d’Orsay”
Versailles
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"M.A.: a French Sonnet"
ENGLAND
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"A Living Doll"
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"My Cricket Kids"
London
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"The Frenchwomen of Fulham"
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"Memento Mori in Highgate Cemetery"
ITALY
Bologna
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"Magdalenian"
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"On Cooking Krakens"
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"Humoral Medicine"
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"Bologna"
Florence
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"Best Portrait"
Genoa
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"Sotto il Mare"
Rome
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"Tiresias and Moses"
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"The Via Appia Catacombs"
Trieste
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"Treasuring Trieste"
Venice
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"Three Other Ways to Look at Venice"
Verona
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"Juliet's Chest"
IRELAND
Bantry
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"Sotto il Mare"
Dublin
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"Drunken Roses"
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"The Black Butterflies"
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"The Argentinian Rugbywomen"
Howth
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"On Painting an Irish Seaside Resort"
ARGENTINA
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"Amerikanoa"
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"The Wandering Basque"
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...
My 2020 Reading List
(These books haven't necessarily been published in 2020)
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (Novel)
Antiemetic for Homesickness - Romalyn Ante (Poetry)
Patria - Fernando Aramburu (Novel)
Da dove la vita è perfetta (English: The Perfect Life) - Silvia Avallone (Novel)
Marina Bellezza - Silvia Avallone (Novel)
Précis de littérature italienne - Célia Filippini (Non-Fiction)
La madre (English: The Mother) - Grazia Deledda (Novel)
Caro Michele (English: Happiness As Such) - Natalia Ginzburg (Novel)
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley - Charlotte Gordon (Biography)
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem - edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod (Poetry)
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (Novel)
Ephebos - Kostya Tsolakis (Poetry)


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
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Italian Renaissance artists
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Sandro Botticelli
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Michelangelo
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Hans Holbein
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Il Caravaggio
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The Pre-Raphaelites (especially John Everett Millais, John William Waterhouse and Edward Burne-Jones)
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Camille Claudel
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Gustav Klimt
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Frida Kahlo
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Salvador Dalí
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Charlotte Salomon
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Pop-surrealism

My 2019 Reading List
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Six Basque Poets: Rikardo Arregi, Bernardo Atxaga, Felipe Juaristi, Miren Agur Meabe, Kirmen Uribe, Joseba Sarrionandia - Arc Publications (Poetry)
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Flèche - Mary Jean Chan (Poetry)
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Les ronces - Cécile Coulon (Poetry)
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Une bête au paradis - Cécile Coulon (Novel)
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Elias Portolu - Grazia Deledda (Novel)
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The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan (Essay)
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Le voci della sera (English: Voices in the Evening) - Natalia Ginzburg (Novel)
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Tutti i nostri ieri (English: All Our Yesterdays) - Natalia Ginzburg (Novel)
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The Fifties Mystique - Jessica Mann (Memoir)
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Le Bal - Irène Némirovsky (Novella)
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Les chiens et les loups (English: The Dogs and the Wolves) - Irène Némirovsky (Novel)
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David Golder - Irène Némirovsky (Novel)
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"Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom" - Sylvia Plath (Short Story)
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Spikenard - Yvonne Reddick (Poetry)
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Translating Mountains - Yvonne Reddick (Poetry)
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Songs My Enemy Taught Me - Joelle Taylor (Poetry)
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Tea With Cardamom - Warda Yassin (Poetry)

Songs that Inspired Poems
As I’m going to start flamenco classes this autumn (I can’t tell you how excited I am!!), here is a selection of music that inspired some of my poems:
Anonymous’s “Joan Petit” : “The Way Joan Petit Dances”
Daniel Balavoine’s “Tous les cris les SOS” : “The Ladybirds’ Invasion”
Daniel Balavoine’s “Lipstick Waterproof” : “Lipstick Waterproof”
Kate Bush’s “Jig of Life” : “Jig of Life”
ERA’s “Ameno”: “Women of Aquitaine”
Serge Gainsbourg’s “Les papillons noirs” : “The Black Butterflies”
Indochine’s “Kill Nico” : “The Wandering Basque”
Indochine’s “Un Ange A Ma Table” : “Six War Letters”
Mikel Laboa’s “Baga, Biga, Higa” : “The Basque Witch Hunt, 1610”
Mano Negra’s “Mala Vida” : “A Gaucho’s Tango”
Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” : “Elegy for A Still-Alive Granny”
Dmitry Shostakovich’s “Waltz number 2” : “Treasuring Trieste”
My Favourite Films
Pedro Almodóvar – Volver
Rachid Bouchareb – Indigènes
(English: Days of Glory)
Tim Burton – Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd
Jane Campion – Bright Star
Sofia Coppola – Marie-Antoinette
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris - Little Miss Sunshine
Xavier Dolan – Laurence Anyways and
The Life and Death of John F. Donovan
Luca Guadagnino – Call Me By Your Name
James Ivory – Maurice
Wong Kar-wai – In the Mood for Love
Emir Kusturica -Time of the Gypsies
Louis Malle – Au Revoir Les Enfants
(English: Goodbye, Children)
Hayao Miyazaki – Princess Mononoke and
Howl’s Moving Castle
Bruno Nuytten – Camille Claudel
Paolo Sorrentino – La Grande Bellezza
(English: The Great Beauty)
Zhang Yimou – Raise the Red Lantern


My Favourite Novels and Short Stories Collections
A Manual for Cleaning Women - Lucia Berlin
East Wind, West Wind and The Mother - Pearl Buck
Children's Children - Jan Carson
Dans ma maison sous terre - Chloé Delaume
A Quiet Belief in Angels - R.J. Ellory
Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
Maurice - E.M. Forster
Le coeur cousu (English: The Threads of the Heart) - Carole Martinez
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Suite Française - Irène Némirovsky
We Were the Mulvaneys - Joyce Carol Oates
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
La part de l'autre - Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
The Bastard of Istanbul and Honour - Elif Shafak
On Beauty - Zadie Smith
The Perfume - Patrick Süskind
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
The Graduate - Charles Webb
The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley

My 2018 Reading List
(These books haven't necessarily been published in 2018)
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Suite Française - Irène Némirovsky
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In Other Words - Jhumpa Lahiri
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Honour - Elif Shafak
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La Ragazza di Bube (English: Bebo's Girl) - Carlo Cassola
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A Hurry of English - Mary Jean Chan
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The Cloven Viscount - Italo Calvino
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The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
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The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
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The Republic of Motherhood - Liz Berry
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La main coupée (English: The Bloody Hand) - Blaise Cendrars
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Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi
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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? - Jeanette Winterson
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The Solitude of Prime Numbers - Paolo Giordano
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The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956 – 1963 - Sylvia Plath
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How to be a Poet - Jo Bell, Jane Commane et. al.
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The Perseverance - Raymond Antrobus