Drained Pond March flies swarm and spill. Blistered prints of dragon-flies and frogs. Dream zones of bright verdure. A shell, its nose held up, crumbles at the merest touch, but […]

Father, it's time we admitted the existence of a hatchet, driven into a knot. I am not asking you for a miracle. I am not asking you to tug at the blade.

Excerpts from David Kherdian, Living In Quiet: New & Selected Poems Root River Picnics Down to the mudwash river we went in Uncle Jack’s putt-putt Model-A Ford and poured our […]

I have to confess that the way memories die away in such a placid fashion has always upset me, but what upsets me even more is the gentle manner in which they allow themselves to be fished out of the waters of the past when we need them for some reason, the way in which they twitch in the net, knowing that they will soon be used to unite two [...]

I'm not a big fan of peregrinations. To understand a place, its myths and language, requires time, and it's a much more enjoyable process when that time is linked to work, whether book work or company work. Everything informs my writing, and new cities have a way of sharpening my senses and reconfiguring my sensibility

I had no-one to take home to “do the baby dance” with safely ... What came into my mind now, replacing dance, were metaphors for aggression. Mobilisation, military campaign, hunt. Small wonder. What the doctor was saying boomed out like an order to assume action stations.

There is something in poetry that is beyond language, but surely it cannot be created without language.

My girlfriend is blind. If I wanted to, I could fool around or even have sex with another girl, if we keep it down – with my girlfriend in the same room, boiling the kettle, microwaving popcorn, drying her hair.

He didn’t fall asleep until shortly before dawn. He’d spent all night traipsing through the empty halls, unable to find a moment’s rest. He halted in vain in front of the glass cases with exotic animals, where he once used to imagine all the happier scenarios his life could’ve followed if only he’d acted differently at this or that particular juncture...