Night and winter provide the dominant metaphors in my first collection, but the mood is wide-ranging, including lyrical evocations of landscape and domestic life and narratives of apocalypse and surreal fantasy. 'Towards Midnight' anticipates some of the material in my 2008 Mandeville, while the long title sequence was my most ambitious excursion so far into poetic narrative. Blizzard won the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and was shortlisted for Best First Collection in the Forward Prizes. It was reissued by Faber and Faber in 2016 to mark the twentieth anniversary of its original publication. Read a poem from my 1996 Faber and Faber collection here.

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"This is an unsettling book, disingenuously plain in address, delicately sophisticated in form, and yet time and time again pulling the solid ground away to introduce notes of intangible terror, loss or love. The long final sequence is genuinely chilling. A formidable debut." (Robert Potts, The Guardian)

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"Blizzard has many of the hallmarks of the later books, with little sense of its vision, imagination, or formal poise being embryonic, rather than fully achieved. At the end ... we get the title poem: a tour-de-force ... which describes a contemporary Britain in which it won’t stop snowing ... The stanzas are astonishingly capacious: they contain a variety of moods and tones, from the comic, to the liturgical, to the apocalyptic." (Sinéad Morrissey, Poetry Foundation)