Out of the Walled Garden
Out of the Walled Garden gathers some of my earlier poetry, including competition-shortlisted and prize-winning pieces that first appeared in magazines and anthologies between 2001 and 2011, now collected in a single volume with brief notes on the memories and circumstances behind the poems. 
Hesperus Wrecked
Koufonissia is a stunning little Greek island. My late wife and I visited for a number of years, quietly sipping our way through wine and Metaxa. This was written on our first visit, when we stayed in a small apartment owned by Mister Cucumberi. That’s what we called him because every morning he left a fresh cucumber and a large tomato for us on the patio table.
​
Pastels, deep flowing blues, long hours,
sunlight through closed shutters,
incandescence streaming into the room,
an evening star, summer night perspiration,
fingers at play, sparring with shadows,
dog-day heat, when the world grows quiet,
oppressed, brazier red under cloudless heights,
swooning with the sway of dry edged palms,
borne on the effervescent Meltemi;
In these hours, breathless bodies lay prone,
panting, tender, bathed in sweat, peeling skin.
They shift the tangled sheets from around their feet.
They are laced together, her legs astride his groin,
her head on his chest, and she sighs softly,
inhaling rapidly, tracing the contours
of his spent muscles with the tips
of her own exhausted fingers
in the quiet space between them,
where children’s voices drift on the wind
and the bleat of a solitary goat tethers
the harsh white moon, he holds her tightly,
enclosed in the drowse dead minutes
marked by the run of tears falling
across her cheek, mingling with the sweat
they are bathed in.
She looks up and smiles, iris wide and deep,
and hazel-blue is the colour of love beneath
wet eyelashes blinking in the silence,
in the heat of the night,
in the light of blue louvered shadows,
and he is the first to break,
a joke;
she looks like the “Wreck of the Hesperus”