The Poetry of Rob Radcliffe

Sometimes I wonder whether some of my poems are too personal, too full of recent turmoil to post - maybe I should keep them for another day, another month, another year?
I have not made a post for a while, things have been happening. It’s funny you can meet someone and you just have this feeling […]

This is one of the very few poems I’ve “written for a purpose”, so I hope it suggests there is some merit in this practice. Usually I have to wait until some urge is tugging at my attention, until a poem is aching to be written. Sometimes life affords few such moments, so […]

I’m becoming very fond of Llandudno and all it, and the surrounding North Wales coast, has to offer. I recently returned there and spent several splendid October days, but this poem was conceived on my first trip there in August, although my mind didn’t give birth to it until late September.
It’s about walking on […]

I spent a few days in Llandudno recently, a trip I’d booked as soon as I returned from my last visit to Wales to stay with Louise and Phil in their beautiful country cottage. I’m finding lately that going away is preferable to coming home, a big change for sure - I’m feeling a […]

The longer the internet goes on, the more it comes to resemble a kind of living, constant time capsule, the artefacts not deliberately buried but more lost in the constant avalanche of new pages. We might expect one day to find our own image, long removed, cached in some archive we’ve never even heard […]

The French poet Paul Valery said that a poem is never finished, only abandonded, and this is something I’ve certainly come to agree with over the years. Poetry is all about playing with words, playing with language, and play done properly is a process, not an end in itself. All the great poems in […]

This isn’t going to feature in the annals of my best work, but seeing as it was the “writer’s group” exercise that kicked off the writing again, I thought I should put it here. The workings are rusty, but I’m at least having phrases and rhythms pop into my head again, I’ve taken to […]

And it’s like learning to walk again, like I’m learning to write two poems, even two lines at a time. The last few months have been very creative ones for me, but I have been creative with life instead of with words, which we all need to do more of I think. At any […]