Headline Poems

My three most recent poems - "Man in Tent", "Tenant" and "Council Worker" - which together I'll call "The Trilogy of Travail", derive from articles I've read recently in the British press.

They are all three the sort of sensationalistic, tragic records which draw people to newspaper reading; as a former reporter (who often used the exalted job title "journalist") myself, I remember the attractions of writing these sorts of stories. I also feel compelled to ask those who would criticise the press for publishing such stories; which came first, the chicken or the egg? Who's holding the mirror, and who's looking into it?

In my brief stint "covering" the Town of Hanson, Massachusetts for the Memorial Press Group in Plymouth, I fortunately never had to cover a tragic death. My colleagues sometimes described the pressures from above (e.g. the editors) in covering tragedies; the expectation that they, the "journalists", would have to go and knock on doors of family and friends of the victim to catch some good quotes for the expected article.

In these poems I've tried to capture the twisted relationship between the press and its readership; beyond that, I suppose my themes are fairly routine and unoriginal - the quest for meaning in life; the day-to-day struggles we all face; where we fit in nature, etc. etc. For these, I have to thank my poetic heroes: Coleridge, Blake, Tennyson, Eliot... and especially Frost who, I believe, towers above the others.