Kester Brewin

An interesting aside on Radio 4 this morning: the social etiquette of maintaining a minute’s silence in the workplace today suggests that most people consider it frowned upon to talk during it, but many still send emails and check social networks. We are becoming less attentive. We’re finding it easy to forget. The web distracts [...]

If… If you can keep your place when all around you Are losing theirs and blaming it on viruses, If you can be trusted to be taken to the beach And have sand and ice cream thrown at you And still be dusted down and lose nothing, If you can wait months for me to [...]

Sorry I’ve not posted much recently… just very busy with all sorts of projects, news of which sometime soon! But can’t resist National Poetry Day, so here’s a new poem I wrote a couple of days ago. Mist Why the mists fall and lift, again or why the rain decides, just then to descend from [...]

For those who grieve… Autumn, Winter, Spring In the rustling of leaves the wind brings rumours of coming autumn and deep down, at the root there is a drawing together, a readying and preparing of each fibre. The sap will not rise a while each branch will thirst and pale into brittleness as the frost [...]

Imaginary The impossibility of finding the root of all that is negative in me; the move into a new plane only a symbolic trick that extends us all into the realm of the imaginary; a mathematical slight of hand: you invented complexity, smiled wryly as you wrote it and called it i.

England draw against the USA – life doesn’t lose all meaning at this point, but it’s great to have good cheer restored in me by, in an act of footballing-literary serendipity, Nick Hornby. His Stuff I’ve Been Reading column in The Believer each month was a genuine highlight. Always funny, always erudite, always an inspiration [...]

Been thinking a lot about the ash cloud that continues to disrupt air-travel the world over. Perhaps it is a good time to reflect and reconsider our relationship to this under-lyingly chaotic earth. Ash in our Mouths Sintered earth, burned and pure is thrown up as if the earth’s guts have sickened, had enough, and [...]

I am both robbers right and left accusing and scheming pitying and arrogant, wanting him to save me, wondering why he didn’t save himself, empathising with the pain, mocking, frightened, pleading guilty, condemned, argumentative an innocent man somewhere lost in the middle of all this; dark days to follow, brighter days promised: ‘remember me’ all [...]

I absolutely love this advent poem by Katherine Venn. She’s currently doing a Masters in poetry at the University of East Anglia, and keeping a blog of the experience over at Minute Particulars. Brother Hare Born with your clothes on, trembling in your scrape, wide eyes open, soft, as new things are, warm; alone, pressed [...]

Post-Partum Amniotics spilt, and semiotics rupture; there are no words, just raw screams and suckles. Child of God, child of man – no difference: new life is unmoored emotion, a wide sea of tears and sick, and just one desire: to feed, gather in, be mother-close. But God won’t stay. Controlled crying; separation an immediate [...]