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What’s in a Name?

HEAT Series 3 Number 18
March 2025
Within this handful of proper nouns, so much pathos, humour, mystery and pain. I saw maps unfold across the globe and traditions receding so far into the past they were barely decipherable. What to one culture may seem dizzyingly complicated is, to another, ordinary. Names may contain history’s greatest upheavals in all their pitilessness and terror, as well as one person’s whimsy, or life-saving choice.
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An Inexperienced World

HEAT 20. Plain Vanilla Futures
2009
The woman lives alone. She has long been sexless. When lustful dreams trouble her, reminding her she has a body, she reaches her legs to the other side of the bed, and lurches onto the cold emptiness. The bed seems wider than the world, her heart empty as the heavens, no boundaries in sight and no one to hear her plaint.
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TA RA RA

HEAT Series 3 Number 17
November 2024
She was lying to several different people for money. She didn’t ‘not come’ from money; her mother had some money and since her mother was dead Romy had some money. She was twenty-nine. ‘I’m twenty-two,’ she said. Not everybody had to be a revolutionary. If she were rich she would be good at it.
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Remembering Dorothy

HEAT 19. Trappers Way
2009
What was always apparent at the outset, however, was her passion for what she did and for who she was. Dot was never, nor ever would be, a wallflower or a shrinking violet – instead she approached life with a kind of bravado and swagger that I could only envy. She knew she was a peculiar talent and she did everything she could to realise her potential.
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Comets

HEAT 8
1998
Cats and comets / are cousins. / With arching tails / and bright orbiting  / mating swoops. / I used to sleep / hugging my cat / I used to sleep / my nose buried / in her fur.
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Three Poems

HEAT Series 3 Number 11
October 2023
How difficult it might be to abandoned and alone, at Easter, at Roma Trastevere Station, watching trains arriving and leaving without you to all sorts of exciting destinations; knowing everyone else was on their way up to the mountains, or off to the seaside; to visit with friends and family; to partake of festive wine and cured olives and fattened, delicately spiced, young lamb.
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An excerpt from ‘Dream Geographies’

HEAT Series 3 Number 16
September 2024
A museum of objects in my study that accompanied the long journey of writing still cast their wonderment through thoughts and imaginary possibilities; the many pictures on the walls and desk – a small print of a Rainbow Serpent, birds, art, photos of dust storms, haze, smoke, a young boxer, mythical landscapes in Asia – all had this responsibility.
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Four Poems

HEAT Series 3 Number 13
March 2024
While travelling in the mountain realm I discover in clear weather how unbusy the Earth / can be mountain after mountain as far as the eye can reach. / Lonely, I make myself noticed by touching with my left elbow and right big toe / the beginning and ending of a hundred-metre-long white thread.
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Ten Stories from The Principal

HEAT 13
2000
She herself was on her way to the moon, and if you laughed at the sight of the fish between her legs, she would eat you – and you came out again as a fish. The man had laughed, and half of him had already disappeared, he was staring straight ahead with a pair of black eyes, and he would go on doing that until she chewed his eyes to bits, and when he next saw something, it would be as a fish.
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Would I Could Own The Face of Eternity

HEAT 6
1997
I could be a murderer, a thief, a seducer of minors, this country offered me the lot and in my anonymity, which hung like a protective cloud around my actions I felt my own response. I was beguiled, enticed, with all these impulses seeming already to have been lying, primed and ready, inside me. Vietnam was the sort of land in which I could get lost inside myself, the land of inner opportunity, and I did get ever so slightly lost and I committed one small crime.
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