Before the Clocks Struck Three (Mr. Eliot Had an Apparition in Salford and It Was Very Foggy)   Salford is the rainiest place, getting   Inside my shoes, wetting   Tired feet in undarned socks.     Yesterday, before the clocks   Struck three, three old horses   Munched wet grass   Among the relics   Of Clifton’s Wet Earth Colliery:   Which on reflection,   Were beautiful objects   Of rust, time and toil.     Fog swirls, curls   Around the clock tower,   The quays, the trees —

The Art of Seeing: Visions of Manchester The seventeen works presented below originate from black-and-white photographs I captured across Greater Manchester many years ago. Through digital brushes and filters, these images have been reimagined and transformed, shifting from documentary records into expressive artworks. Each piece reflects both the architectural memory of place and the creative act of refashioning, where the familiar urban landscape is rendered anew in color,

The Irwell - a river poem Rock-solid ground loosens,    shifts to liquid,    slips fast away beneath my feet.      The water dreams of boats, of willow banks,    not a foul stream of refuse    but a seam alive with freshwater shrimp,    roach, and brown trout.      A mallard halts —    strums his feathers,    beats the air into rhythm,    poised to rise above this stretch,    this blue-lined artery    we call the River Irwell.

On foot from Edinburgh to Canterbury for a once-in-a-decade conference on ‘What It Means to Be a High-Functioning Humanzee in a Mythological World’, we are discussing the cultural fallout of ‘phase three scholasticism’, which has rocked the academic world and the Catholic Church in Ireland, and is responsible for the suicide of at least five university deans and three bishops, as well as the war between the Irish and the Brits. The discussion is heated and many of us are on t

Relics Yesterday, before the snow, three old horses munched wet grass as I walked through the relics of an abandoned colliery, which on reflection, were beautiful objects of time and rust.

A Skein of Black Water The moon appeared to float on a skein of black water and a wind sang a high pitch B, 246.94 Hertz. And something else – a distant police car? Or a muffled bell tolling the lost river Dene?

Lancaster bleached by rain – a wet wind blows through a line of washing. Fog frost, petrol odour, urban towertops vanish in the aerial grey

A mallard stops, strums His feathers, beats his wings, Ready to fly over this stretch Of blue-lined water

Fog swirls, curls around vans, cars, slips ghostlike through bare branches.