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This is the central home for all of my creative work. Whether you are a long-time reader or visiting for the first time, I invite you to dive in and explore.
🧭 How to Navigate the Site
Latest Postings: Tap on the links in the written menus below to search my writing. To dive straight into my most recent pieces three will show on my front page. To browse by Category: Click the Menu drop down at the bottom of the page. Simply choose a category that sparks your interest and see what you discover.
✒️ The Poetry: From Craft to Soul
My writing journey spans over a decade, and you will find an eclectic mix of styles reflecting that growth.
The Evolution of Style: Explore everything from my early, structured days—where my poetry was more didactic and traditionally rhymed—through to my contemporary work, which leans toward free verse while still experimenting with classical forms.
Themes & Texture: I have a deep love for psychological poetry, vivid imagery, and the natural music of language. My hope is that you find lines within these pages that truly speak to your own experiences.
The Craft Behind the Words: Having dedicated several years to studying the mechanics of writing, I also share numerous craft-based articles. If you are a fellow writer or a curious reader, these insights into the “how” and “why” of poetry are for you.
📚 Coming Soon: Sneak Peeks & Previews
I am currently in the exciting throes of producing two new books of poetry that take an intimate look at psychology and the self.As these collections come together, I will be sharing exclusive snippets right here on the blog. Keep a close eye out for these previews I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts, reactions, and feedback as the project evolves.
Enjoy your time exploring, and thank you for reading!
Below see my Three Latest Posts.
- The Invisible Musician:Tuning the Mouth of a Poem.
Imagine two poets looking at the exact same winter landscape. They both want to describe a freezing, bitter wind moving across an icy field.
The first poet writes:
The cold wind blew over the empty fields.
The line is accurate. We understand the meaning. But the brain processes it entirely as an intellectual concept. It doesn’t move us.
The second poet tunes the line using euphonics:
A bitter frost cuts across the crisp, cracked dirt.
Suddenly, you aren’t just reading about winter your mouth is experiencing it. The sharp, biting plosives (t, k) and the sudden, harsh consonants (cr, fr) physically force your tongue to clip the breath, mimicking the sharp intake of cold air and the brittle snap of frozen ground.
As poets, we often spend hours hunting for the perfect image or the most striking metaphor. But we often forget that a poem’s sonic texture tells the emotional story long before the intellect ever decodes the dictionary definitions on the page. Every word we choose carries a physical weight, a mouth-feel, and a specific breath requirement. When you write a poem, you aren’t just a painter using words as colour, you are a composer scoring a piece of music for the human vocal tract.
The Subvocalization Secret
Even when a reader consumes your poem in absolute, silent isolation, their brain triggers micro-movements in their vocal cords and tongue. They are physically “tasting” your lines. If your sonic landscape is accidental, the emotional resonance of your poem will be accidental, too.
The Anatomy of Breath: Controlling the Reader’s Pulse
When a reader encounters a poem, they surrender their breathing pattern to the page. Every comma, every line break, and most importantly every consonant cluster dictates exactly when they can inhale, when they must hold their breath, and how much physical resistance their mouth encounters.As a poetic tool, we can divide the alphabet not by grammar, but by how it forces the human body to manage air.
The Speed Brakes: Plosives and Friction
If you want to slow a reader down, build tension, or evoke a sense of rugged, broken reality, you need to introduce sonic friction. This is achieved through plosives (b, p, t, d, k, g)—sounds that require the lips or tongue to completely trap the airway and then release it in a miniature explosion of breath.
When you stack plosives together, the reader’s tongue is forced to do heavy, athletic work:
The dark rock cracked.
Notice how your mouth must physically stop between dark, rock, and cracked. You cannot rush that line. The physical effort required to say it mirrors the hard, unyielding nature of the stone itself.
The Open Highway: Liquids and Nasals
Conversely, if you want to evoke a sense of endless space, flowing water, heavy grief, or a dream state, you want to eliminate friction. For this, you turn to liquids (l, r) and nasals (m, n). These sounds allow the air to flow continuously through the mouth or nose without ever hitting a hard wall.
The river runs over lonely stones. Say it aloud. The breath glides seamlessly from word to word. There are no sudden collisions. The line lengthens out, slowing the reader’s pulse not through friction, but through a deep, rolling relaxation of the vocal tract.
Consonant Group
Physical Action in the Mouth /Psychological Effect
Plosives (b, p, t, d, k, g)
Air is completely blocked, then burst open.
Urgency, violence, fracturing, panic, structure.
Liquids & Nasals (l, r, m, n)
Air flows continuously over the tongue or nose.
Longing, mourning, peace, fluid motion, timelessness.
Sibilants & Fricatives (s, sh, f, v)
Air is squeezed through a narrow opening.
Secrecy, suspense, wind, decay, whisper, erosion.
Each letter in a word plays its own part and our letters are divided into vowels and consonants. The vowels a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y and all the rest if the alphabet are consonants the scaffolding
The Vowel Staircase: Pitch, Scale, and Emotional Descent
If consonants provide the rhythmic bones and muscle of a poem, vowels are its lung capacity. While consonants dictate the stopping and starting of breath, vowels dictate the resonance.Every vowel you write carries an inherent musical pitch and physical volume determined by the shape of your mouth. By understanding vowel gradation the intentional scaling of vowel sounds from high and tight to low and open—you can map an emotional trajectory directly onto the reader’s subconscious.
High, Tight Vowels: The Attic of the Mouth
Sounds like the long ee (gleam, needle), short i (glint, silver), and short e (speck, net) are produced at the very front of the mouth. The tongue rises high, the lips narrow, and the acoustic chamber becomes small and tight.Because these sounds have a higher acoustic frequency, they naturally evoke:
Sharp brightness or crystalline light.
Anxiety, tension, and containment.
Smallness, precision, or triviality
“The thin ice glints in the bitter wind.”(The high pitch feels cold, sharp, and physcally restricted.)
Low, Open Vowels: The Cellar of the Chest
Conversely, sounds like the long oo (gloom, moon), open o (toll, bone), and broad ah (father, dark) require the tongue to drop and the throat to open wide. The sound resonates deeper down, utilizing the full volume of the mouth and chest.These deep frequencies naturally evoke:
Heaviness, shadow, and solemnity
Vast, echoing spaces or structural scale
Grief, longing, and the passage of time
“The old stone tolls alone in the dark.”(The low pitch creates an immediate sense of weight, echo, and somber finality.)
Walking the Staircase:
Sonic Gradation
The true magic happens when a poet consciously strings vowels together to create a physical sense of movement—a sonic staircase.
Moving down
[HIGH / LIGHT] ee (gleam) i (glint)
Moving up
creates tension, rising energy,
e (speck) or a sense of vanishing into light. a (cat) u (mud) o (bone)
Moving down creates gravity,
emotional descent,
oo (gloom) or a sense of entering deep water. [LOW / HEAVY]
Look at how a line can physically “fall” into sorrow simply by shifting its vowels from high to low across the page:
A thin bell tolls.
The line starts high and thin (thin), steps down slightly through the short e (bell), and drops entirely into the heavy, resonant cellar of the open o (tolls). The word “tolls” feels heavier because the mouth has been progressively opened to receive its weight.By tuning your vowels along this staircase, you can ensure that when your poem descends into grief, or rises into ecstasy, the reader’s physical breath travels the exact same path
- Podcast Episode: The Crucible of Grit – From Victorian Wards to the Western Front Companion to Article 2.
Pip: There is a version of nursing history that involves soft lighting and quiet heroism. Mary’s latest work for Converging Lives suggests the actual version involved scrubbing stone floors on your knees at midnight.
Mara: This episode follows the journey from Victorian hospital wards to the Western Front — the grit, the discipline, and the brutal gap between what young nurses expected and what they actually found.
Pip: Let’s start with that crucible.
From Victorian wards to the Western Front
Mara: The central claim here is that modern nursing wasn’t built on compassion alone — it was forged through physical punishment, hierarchy, and psychological endurance that most of us would struggle to imagine.
Pip: The poem “Probationer 1896” sets the scene directly. A trainee nurse in a Victorian children’s ward writes: “Ice flowers bloom across the ward windows the glass brittle with cold. My bones ache from scrubbing bedsheets in the sluice.”
Mara: What that means in practice is that these women were the hospital’s labour force before they were its caregivers — hauling coal, banking fires, maintaining ledgers, all under a Matron who demanded perfection in every linen fold.
Pip: And the children in those beds had no family visits allowed. The haibun closes on that quietly devastating note — wondering whether the children’s dreams were cold too.
Mara: That Victorian discipline, as punishing as it was, turned out to be exactly the preparation needed when 1914 arrived. The second piece, “Theory v Practice – 1914 VAD,” tracks what happened when thousands of sheltered young volunteers stepped off boats into casualty clearing stations.
Pip: Their training had involved Hyde Park, painted scars on healthy skin, and messenger boys who, as the poem puts it, “never screamed. They never writhed. They never prayed for morphia.”
Mara: The reality that replaced it was a field-hospital floor thick with the dying, wounds that were not placed but blasted — shoulders shot away, faces erased. The post describes shrapnel, gas burns, relentless bombardment, and floors slick with blood.
Pip: It’s the gap between the drill and the floor that the writing keeps returning to. Neat simulations versus the geography of war — that phrase does a lot of work.
Mara: And yet they adapted. The post argues that by the armistice, the image of the nurse as a decorative caretaker had been permanently replaced by something forged under genuine extremity — a professional whose grit had been tested in conditions the world had never seen before.
Pip: Iron discipline meeting industrial horror. The resilience that came out the other side wasn’t incidental — it was structural.
Mara: That question of what endures — what gets passed forward from one generation of practitioners to the next — feels like the thread worth pulling.
Pip: From frozen ward windows to field-hospital floors — the distance is a century, but the endurance feels continuous.
Mara: Next time, we’ll see where that thread leads.
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Converging Lives. Sounds, Silence and Imagery 