It looks innocuous, sounds harmless, pops up all over the place – and it’s a killer. No, not ‘shards’. Not even ‘memories’.

I teach loads of adult students who loathe poetry. Sometimes I hate it more than they do. I look at books of it piling up around me and I feel sick. I feel like the miller’s daughter locked in a room of straw without the faintest hope of Rumpelstiltskin.

Here’s the scenario:

Your cousin has had a book of poems published. He sends you the Amazon link. Good grief!! It costs TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY QUID. Will you buy it?

Shakespeare said it first. Or at least Don Paterson’s version of Shakespeare’s sonnet 102 did:

That love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming
The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere.

. . . the only two themes, it seems to me, and they are one and the same. I only met Linda Chase once in the flesh, but I loved her. And now she's gone.

The email newsletter went out last week flagging three new publications. But guess what I forgot?