“... have four dozen, which I pack into my towel. A plenary line of Seamus Heaney’s about the singer David Hammond’s thatched cottage at Dooey comes to mind – ‘I say to myself Gweebarra.’ Then I think of these lines from another poem, ‘Oysters’: Alive and violated They lay on their beds of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ...”

“... family Christmas in New Jersey, with her hair in its undyed colour, a plain, flat brown.Angela​ Trimble was born on 1 July 1945 in Miami. Her mother and father had been ‘childhood sweethearts’, but had split up, then reunited many years later, by which time he was married with children and working as a boiler repairman. So the baby was put up for ...”