Next: Collected Poems

Poetry by the screenwriter of Hideous Kinky starring Kate Winslet, and script editor of Jane Campion's The Piano.

A poetry of Athens and Berlin of faux-mythologies and love and put-downs, songs of the dislocated, songs of the streets.

This poetry volume is the yield of almost nine years of notebooks, observations and locations, mostly Athens and Berlin, but a smattering of London, Marrakech, Cameroon and West Bengal. I am a worker in film and stage: it is a wandering life.

The act of observation may be at the heart of all this, of observed events on a daily, human scale, but also of recorded personal feelings and reactions, a springboard to some more generalised reality, to the mythos of the particular moment.

A lost button on a Berlin cafe pavement, a shabby girl in golden sandals, a civic rubbish bin, the lures of poverty, the nags of memory; each is commonplace enough, but a window, too, onto the sightlines and vanishing points of human possibility.

Poetry functions at the edge of grammar and hence the edge of meaning, with all its pitfalls and opportunities. Yet to quote an unexpected and surprising source, Anais Nin: 'In dreams we dream alone. Only reality is shared.' Not only author, but player in that concomitant. The imaginary speaker, the imagined self, imagined listener – all of that, of course. And yet there is the broader stage of common struggle and imagination whose best practitioner may yet remain the popular song. It wakes you, a half-discovered melody, half-invented, a fragment at your bedside. Not the stuff of dreams. A visitor, for real. The stuff of song, whose voice is simple in its simple imperative, simple in its life-affirmingness. Singer. Sing.

For fans of Catullus, Tu Fu, Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova, Berthold Brecht, Jacques Prevert, and Robert Graves.