The Grass Thins As You Climb The Hill

I am really excited to announce the publication of my first collection of poetry. It's a very limited print run on the Brighton based Eyeless label. I have also produced a special audio version complete with ambient backing included as a free download with the book but also available to download separately. This is a very proud moment for me and I'm very happy to share it with the world. Here is what I wrote about this release: I first started writing poetry as a child, in secret books that nobody ever saw. It made me feel so good to do it that somehow it felt as though I should keep it to myself but then I wasn’t moving through a world where poetry seemed to have much of a place. The brutal inner-city ‘realism’ of my South-East London childhood didn’t want my poet’s soul; it felt like it would eat you up if it knew who you really were so you had to produce a dead shell to walk in: an avatar. You had to pretend that you were tough, impervious, scornful. I was never very good at that. We didn’t study poetry at school (we didn’t study anything at school) but we were introduced to poets like Linton Kwesi-Johnson, John Agard and Benjamin Zephania which in itself was a very great thing though I didn’t realise it at the time, only later. As time went on I was kidnapped by my discovery of music and my main focus was on songwriting but I never stopped writing poems in my secret books. To be more accurate I should say that poems never stopped appearing to me because I very rarely sit down to write one, they enter my head like a visitation. In fact sometimes if one arrives when I’m driving I have to pull over to write it down. They arrive like that sometimes almost fully formed, other times they are more enigmatic and I need to spend months interpreting them. In any case, I can’t stop them appearing; I have no control over it.

This is the first collection of poems that I have produced to share with other people and I am very proud to release them into the world. Of course I hope very much that people will like and appreciate them but even if they don’t like or appreciate them I shan’t stop writing them in the secret books. I can’t you see. You'll can find it here: