Should also have mentioned that I have two poems in the 10th anniversary anthology for Carillon magazine - Ten Forward. It is an excellent collection and I recommend to all. The poems are Nutty Cluster which is about growing up in Barry, South Wales and Going To Church   which was written following a writing weekend at Woody's Top organised by Paul Sutherland. Here they are: 

Nutty Cluster

We had come in the rain that winter evening, to Mass.

From the balcony I watched the priest moving with a swagger

of vestments about the altar; a drone of lulling Latin sustaining
a congregation held tight in their obligation and damp coats.
Their expiration - waxen, mildew, incense - rising up to me,

the smell measuring off a sad, dogged virtue still.

The walk back was happy though; a family shriven
light with righteousness, putting aside the week past,
not yet obliged to face the one ahead; she said we could fill
white paper triangles in the sweetshop by the corner -

allsorts, ruffles, nutty cluster- small sandbags against want.
At home the furniture was pulled forward to the red coals;
a borderline defined against darkness and cold. Out there,
beyond the backs of the circled chairs was Indian country.

We were hermetic here; colluding in our secret wisdom -  this was
the best that life could offer -  signalling our joy in steady dips
into the small bags as the cornered television glowed. We
watched contestants tried to win things. People laughed

as others sacrificed themselves for the chance of bounty.
She rejoiced in the doubling of money as the striking of a blow
against where and what she now was and would forever be.
“I like to see them getting something for nothing”. She said it

emphatically, hard-eyed as an acolyte in a growing faith; the argument
airtight, and the saying of it a simple mystery and no less.
It was sympathetic magic which could not be denied; these TV poppets,
keeping the fires warming, holding the darkness forever at bay.

We had come in the rain that winter evening, from Mass.

GOING TO CHURCH

Driving through chalk wold proved like kneaded dough,

aquaplaning along shiny slick spider web roads,
I am going to church. Through car windows lies

exhausted prairie steaming like piled pelts  -

an abraded landscape anonymous of hedge, fence,
farmhouse. The mist lifts: Haugham church

becomes a vacant ark precarious on the hill top; 

a cynosure no eye will turn towards, guiding no-one
with bell peal or promises – saved but not sacramental.

Squires, tenants, faith all ebbed away, leaving

this spatchcocked church, a spineless gallery,
cold triumphs and tragedies recalled across wall

and window. Hudson, Eve, Pearson, Anton: names,

like blade bones thrown on the flagged aisles,
rattling about this reliquary, foretelling nothing.

Spire-spiked in its allotment of hawthorn, holly, elder;

a church redundant amid scoured fields once
swarming with those who cut and carried stone,

sawed wood, turned earth, sowed, planted, harvested;

who stayed honest too long to the covenant binding all
together to this place. Their fields have been stripped

right before them. The community of the faithful,

working now in factory, bar or office; wondering at
the provenance of the plenty on supermarket shelves.

Here a fox is dug deep into a grave. Here a yew, roots

half torn up and leaning, becomes a lych gate receiving
the dead. Here is a church unworthy of the coming.