Clock Watching

Holding Breath

Magnus

Magnus is the patron Saint of the Orkney Isles, and there is an oilfield in the North Sea of the same name.

Magnus is a book about that mysterious natural phenomenon, oil, that holds the condensed remains of billions of ancient creatures and which has been at the center of the modern world for so long.

Night-Shining White

The flight of a Chinese Emperor from court in the wake of political intrigue, and the lover he left on the wayside; a famous steed, immortalised by a famous painter.

Night-Shining White conflates these two Chinese sources to tell a story of impassioned remembrance.

Nilometer

The Nilometer measures the rise and fall of the Nile, and with it the centuries of a people's fortunes.

Nilometer is a book that tries to come to terms with the magnitude of a human past that goes back millenia.

Radio

"What lies in the darkness/behind the speaker grille?"

Radio is a book on the subject of communication: its difficulties, its uncertainties, and the chance we take in reaching out to others.

The Remembrancer

A colonial veteran looks back over the course of his life spent in India, reflecting on the changes that take place inlife, memory, and history.

The Remembrancer looks through the eyes of an early twentieth-century photographer to discuss the way that our identity and the way we interpret our historical milieu changes over time.

Tiercel

The Battle of Maldon told from the point of view of a hunting falcon that is realeased from the hand of one of the English in the original tenth-century poem.

Tiercel approaches a sense of inevitable fate in much the same tone as the original, but in its hurtling towards a destructive end, shows this to be an ultimately tragic illusion.

Turndust

A windmiller courts destruction by working in a storm: the wind can take over and wreck the mill he holds in his care.

Turndust frames the difficult decisions we must sometimes make, only to find out later the folly of our path.

Twelve O’ Clock Wood

A gamekeeper was shot dead in a woods near Bath in 1927.

Twelve O’ Clock Wood is part of a series of books that explores this event and its links to such subjects as property, food and the artwork which celebrates the countryside and hunting.

This first book sets the scene itself

Under the Wire

Barbed wire, chains, string and leather straps contain and constrain the landscape and hold the stocks of guns secure in their boxes. Under the Wire takes a thread that dips under the perimeter to poach on the territory beyond.

Part II of the Whistling Copse series.

Safely Infer

The murder that this series relates to was an important one in establishing the admissability of ballistics evidence.

Safely Infer looks at the way events are presented as facts from the evidence they leave, asking for us to infer their occurence and factual nature.

Assessing the quality and arguments of evidence, and inferring what in their judgemant are the facts of the case is the job of a jury.

Pheasant Moon

Part III of the Whistling Copse series, this briefest of books alludes to the decoration of ceramics. In the context of the series’ themes of property and poaching, this reference brings in aspects of how competing ideas of food and property vie for the possession of the animals being hunted.

The Morning and the Evening

A journey cross country is complicated by a sudden snowfall, and the idea of celestial navigation across vast territories achieves a sudden new relevance.

Part of a series dealing with the six days of the Creation, The Morning and The Evening conflates the stars in the heavens with the head-and-tail-lights of cars, more familiar as markers of the way ahead to those who regularly spend the morning and the evening commuting.

Firmament

A Kabbalistic notion of Creation has it that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are the means by which the Almighty brings the universe into being. Here I have enlarged the family of letters involved. This is partly in order to have more than 22 at my disposal, partly because of the poetry of letter names themselves, and partly to enlarge the claim of alphabets in general to create the world.

Ocean

An arc of trees, beginning with reading left-to right up out of the earth, up to the aerial crossing of the canopy and back down again to the earth where we, the readers, are standing.

Ocean seeds this arc with the names of rivers, alluding to the visual symmetry between the branching of trees and rivers.

Smoke-Flower

A midnight exploration of the city reveals some of its mysteries and convolutions.

In doing so, it releases some of the protagonist’s own memories, mysteries and sectrets.

Holden’s Silence

A hundred years hence, the fortress walls of a ruined library wait for someone to come and reawaken the secrets sleeping within.

Obscura

A naturalist's observations involve him peering down at some insect life beneath his lens.

Intrigued by a nearby Camera Obscura, he carries on his observations on a larger scale, and sees more than he expected to.

City of Hands

A city stands on a plain, various rivers flowing in and out of it, and ringed around with the hills and valleys ofits topography. The configuration of this landscape will influence the fortunes of the city as time goes by.

Palmistry asserts that our lives are similarly situated in the topography of our hands.

Civitas

A suite of prints inspired by the ruined Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.