This Shearsman Gallery website, timed to coincide with the publication by Salt of my second book, a.m., is designed to give a selective introduction to my work. The material, which is being assembled in stages, comprises poems, notes, artwork and essays by other contributors.

In terms of poetry, the site is organised chronologically, beginning with poems from my first book (Poems 1987–1992, Odyssey Poets, 1994), and ending with poems of very recent composition.
The site is not quite a 'virtual' or 'cyber' Selected, however – if by a Selected, one thinks primarily of a choice of the best published work, representatively mapping the phases of an output. Rather, for a number of reasons, I wanted to approach this Gallery appearance in a different way.

The web is not a print medium, and offers, via links and graphic resources, a new kind of architecture, which we have sought to explore here; there seemed a redundancy in only publishing in e-form work already available in print; and because of my approach to publication for the last decade or so, the larger part of my work remains unavailable – thus, to choose only from published poems would give a rather unbalanced view of the output.

My principal aim with this site, though, and the one governing most of the selections, was to try and give an interior, or more intimate, view of the development of the poetry. This has led me to go back and examine work which I set aside, in some cases nearly a decade ago – the poems are rather like cars which have been parked in underground garages for years, never claimed by their owners, or like weathered tors or outcrops, remaining after all the surrounding land has been eroded. Some poems struck me as almost freakish when I first re-read them, as evolutionary spurs which did not follow a central organic line of development, and died away in manuscript…

But it seemed to me that such a model – that of a poetic progress, which develops along a central line, with branches and dead-ends, proceeding eventually to some assumed end – is not necessarily the most helpful one for viewing a writer's life and work. Perhaps a more useful, notional model might be to take the writer as a centre, and then to plot individual poems as points standing at different positions and distances from that centre, like the radii of a star. In such a model, the star will be inevitably be asymmetric, with some points further from the centre than others – all the points, however, are integral to the star. It was in the spirit of this second kind of model that Ihave tried to gather together the poems included here.

I have elected to write a number of remarks on individual poems or phases of work. I wanted these notes to be reasonably relaxed and informal, descriptive and informative rather than programmatic. To be candid, I am still not sure of whether it is a good or a bad thing for a writer to comment upon their own work in this way – I believe poems are numenous creations, and I would hate to strip the numen away from poems, and deprive the reader of an unprejudiced experience of the work. However, it is also important for me to try and make my work accessible to anyone who is prepared to take a step towards the poems. I am not one of those writers who 'writes for himself'. My work is profoundly and essentially for other people, without whom writing is meaningless. People bring unique histories and experiences to their reading, and some readers may feel the notes are useful, while other readers may not. Of course, the reader has the choice as to whether or not they turn to the remarks…

In any case, I hope that readers may find something of value within this site.

Before passing on to the acknowledgements, I would like to end this introduction with three very different quotes. The first two are from Aleksandr Blok, the great Russian poet, who said:

"There is no such thing as art which is not new";

and also:

"the worlds of art relate to politics in much the same way as the sea relates to a ship".

The last quote is a charming one from the American composer, Morton Feldman:

"My past experience was not to 'meddle' with the material, but use my concentration as a guide to what might transpire. I mentioned this to Stockhausen once when he had asked me what my secret was. 'I don't push the sounds around.' Stockhausen mulled this over, and asked: 'Not even a little bit?'"

Acknowledgements

I thank Tony Frazer, firstly for his kind invitation for me to contribute to the Shearsman Gallery, and secondly for his hard work and the generous use of his time and expertise in designing and implementing this site.

I'm extremely grateful to those people who have contributed articles. I appreciate the time and trouble taken, especially against the background of busy personal and professional lives. 'For who did not write the word?'

There are several people who have crucially supported my work: on this occasion, I particularly thank Andrew Duncan and Peter Riley for their sustained engagement with my writing over a number of years.

My thanks to Chris Emery for all his efforts on behalf of a.m.

As always, I thank my friends and family – they form, in some senses, the soul of my work. 'When I needed a word to say … I said your name'.

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