Jane's Writing Shed.

I said, I love you. You said, we're not really related are we? I said, well I married your grandmother so we're all part of the same family. You said, like we're both human? Can you read the book now?

As he scraped remnants of flesh from the carcass of the dead pilot whale, Trevor spoke of whale sightings and death accumulations of fossils. Once he had seen an Orca pod steal up on a RIB full of Antarctic tourists, he'd gripped the tiller and stared hard into the eye of a killer whale. A man whose arthritic hands now pulled wires tight through the bleached skeleton, fixing it to the whitewashed croft wall: a whale leaping into its own shadow.

I was delighted to win the Wigtown Poetry Competition (Main Prize) with Eel Ghazal in October 2012. A brown eel caught itself on a casually thrown hook, Anguilla anguilla where are all the marshland glass wrigglers? weir and dam,net trap and poison you slithery boy as tricky as a spiv closing in on the next deal. Brown fen lurker,yellow canal threader,green mud swimmer, an elusive thought slipping in and out like a rumour. Surreptitiously you respond to an ancient voice, the Sargasso pulling you back into its mysterious stillness. Only your offspring return,catching the current - eel breed,eel feed for all your lives, for all of your long dark lives.