Each title below links directly to its recital on my Daily Bread Poetry YouTube channel. Simply click on the title to watch and listen.
Welcome to my collection of narrated poems.
For many years, Daily Bread Poetry has been a place where readers could discover my poems in print. I have now begun recording a selection of them in my own voice, accompanied by carefully chosen images that reflect the mood and setting of each piece.
I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as I have enjoyed writing them.
These recordings accompany the poems published on Daily Bread Poetry and are presented in the order they have been recorded.
The first poem in this series tells the story of Harold, a man who chose a life apart from the modern world.
Maasai is a reflective poem inspired by East Africa, exploring identity, landscape and the enduring relationship between people and place.
A quiet meditation on memory, love, and the lives that might have been.
A reflection on family, reconciliation, and the enduring footsteps that connect us across generations.
A quiet reflection on remembrance and the enduring cost of war.
A poem inspired by my former schoolmaster, Lieutenant Commander Henry Mirehouse RN, who was seriously wounded aboard HMS Amethyst during the Yangtze Incident of 20 April 1949. Years later, I came to understand the lasting impact of those events.
Memory, friendship and the lingering wounds of war.
A conversation with my daughter becomes an unexpected reflection on self-acceptance, and the unexpected kindness of seeing ourselves as we truly are.
On finding perspective when life feels difficult, and on the quiet reassurance of looking up.
A poem about the moment when a pause says everything.
A poem about my friend and colleague Rob McKee, a Nairobi hotel, a pretty waitress, and one of many farewells before we headed off on separate assignments.
A reflection on ageing, beliefs, absent voices, and the elusive boundary between solace and solitude.
A childhood encounter with a frightened squirrel, and a lesson that would return unexpectedly many years later.
A walk with my daughter through the May countryside, where two skylarks become part of a moment of mutual understanding.
Written for my daughter, reflecting on the quiet strength and resilience I saw in her from the very beginning.
My first day at an English public school, aged thirteen. Thirty years earlier, my father had arrived at the same school. This is a memory of the moment I first understood that leaving was difficult for him too.
A poem about a mother, and the closeness between a mother and son that gradually faded into silence — and the possibility that, towards the end of her life, she remembered him again.
Written while tending my daughter’s grave — a reflection on loss, memory, and the possibility that nothing is ever entirely wasted.
She was late. My imagination wasn’t.
A quiet reflection on resilience, tenderness and the grace of bending rather than breaking — and on the love that cushions the rocky path home.
A recollection from imprisonment: an apparently affable inmate, a moment of instinctive unease, and a disturbing invitation that revealed rather more than it seemed.
A quiet reflection on the fragile boundary between life and death — a tiny fledgling, held briefly in the warmth of a human hand, while summer carried on around it.
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