Continuing our fortnightly poetry feature, Stephen Pentz takes the train... It is a commonplace that travelling by train is more conducive to observation and to contemplation than travelling by, say, car or airplane. Not surprisingly, therefore, a great store of poetry exists that has its origins in someone gazing out of ... Read More...

Every other Sunday we'll be bringing you great poetry in a relaunched Dabbler Verse feature (alternating with Mahlerman's Lazy Sunday music posts). For this first post we welcome the wonderful blogger Stephen Pentz to The Dabbler... Sometimes the fact that a certain person is simply there in the world -- as a ... Read More...

February and it's still raining. It’s raining, it’s pouring, The old man is snoring, He went to bed and bumped his head And couldn’t get up in the morning. As someone said, my favourite rhyme about a lonely old person dying in their bed in a storm. Like much else in the nursery repertoire, a ... Read More...

Controversy continues to rage here at The Dabbler - now Gaw's claiming that the recent weather has really been quite enjoyable I can’t remember enjoying snow so much. It must have something to do with there being just enough for some fun but not enough to disrupt travel too seriously, at ... Read More...

How far can you travel on a sofa? I’ve been working on and off for a number of years in the world of sofas, God forgive me. So I was surprised I hadn’t heard of the “sofa poem by Seamus Heaney” that a colleague referred to the other day. She was ... Read More...

It happens to be around about the right time of year for a poem featuring the seagull.Susan’s post of last Saturday and associated comments touched on the subject of seagulls. I think we can all agree that they’re unsettling. But I don’t think it’s just about the ‘cold, black eyes’ ... Read More...

Nige discovers an overlooked gem - the poet William Matthews, who wrote sonnets about basketball, getting old and office life... Opening Don Paterson's anthology 101 Sonnets at random, I came across this beauty, by William Matthews, an American poet I had never encountered before (he died in his 50s in 1997, having never ... Read More...

Nige presents a mini-anthology: Hill on Rain... For obvious reasons, this 'summer' my mind turned to the poetry of rain - and thereby to Geoffrey Hill. Our Greatest Living Poet is a veritable laureate of rain. Rain is his res, his thing; no one writes better about English rain in its ... Read More...

Something to tide you over our epically wet drought. A couple of days a week I wander to work through the back-streets of Chelsea, between the Kings Road and the river. They must be some of the most charming streets to be found in any city; pricey charm though - I ... Read More...

In this centenary month of the sinking of the Titanic we welcome Mark Richardson, literary professor and blogger, on a poem that dips into deep and strange waters to quite astonishing effect. Thomas Hardy first published The Convergence of the Twain in the program printed for a "Dramatic and Operatic Matineé in Aid ... Read More...