E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Had this year been only about good songs, TV shows and movies, plays, concerts, seeing friends, swimming, reading and holidays, it might rank among my top ten favourite years since I was born. However, three major factors make me consider 2025 one of the worst years in my personal experience, and probably one of the very worst years of the past century geo-politically. 1. My mother died. I won't write more here about this, but as you can imagine, this has been the saddest and most upsetting personal life event since the death of my father. 2. Trump, the war against Ukraine, and war and suffering in the Middle East, not to mention other wars and tragedies and terror attacks, led to a geo-political instability "at home and abroad" - with American democracy being undermined as perhaps never before, not even during the Nixon period. 3. The environment. Without even considering the existential risk to all humanity from nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, nanotech, a new pandemic li...

I usually write a brief report on the year, from my perspective, at the end of each 12-month cycle - sometimes closer to Christmas, or after. Of late, they've been relatively solemn, and the main message has been gratitude. I have been grateful for the medical care and treatment that has allowed my failing heart to recover somewhat, at least temporarily, and for the chance to live a few more years. I was hospitalised in the summer with Sepsis and was in for many days and it was terrifying, but made it through. I have also been grateful for the love and support of my partner, the hard work and talent of my publishing team, my friends, and those authors and investors that have miraculously helped stave off collapse of BSPG. So it is, this year, that message remains the same. I wish to add a few more things, though -  this past year has been very painful, sad, and filled with some brief good moments of shared memories. I spent several weeks with someone very closely related to me who ...

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise...

2022 WILL LIKELY BE REMEMBERED by historians for the Ukraine War, the ongoing climate emergency, the deaths of The Queen and Gorbachev, the three UK prime ministers, and the lingering pandemic and economic fall-out; maybe the Bitcoin collapse, as a 7th. For me, it was the year of recovery, after nearly dying in hospital last Christmas - taking 4 months off, getting a defibrillator implant device, and taking 11 pills a day for my chronic Heart Failure. I want to express how grateful I am to the doctors, and nurses, and those who helped me stay alive this year. Grateful to God. I want to thank my friends, my family, my partner. And say how glad I was to spend time with my brother, his wife, and my godson Alex, this summer, in Spain. I want to thank those writers, poets, colleagues, and patrons, who helped me keep BSPG functional in a challenging year for small businesses. Please may you have love, peace and light this Christmas time, this season of holidays and the solstice...

My report will be brief this year - I am grateful to be alive. 2021 was a very tough year for a lot of people - and 2022 looks to be also very challenging. Up until December, 2021, I would have said the best of the year was keeping the Eyewear publishing company going so it could reach its 10th year (2022), and therefore keeping a small good team in work; and 100s of books in print. Personally, hiking in Northern Ireland/the North of Ireland, and doing wild swimming, and training with Al Beard, and Wimbledon, would have been summer highlights; plus great sporting events, and the English almost winning the Euros... Then, a few days before Christmas, I went into the hospital for heart failure; I have a large blood clot on my heart, and my heart was only working 17% or so. Now it is up to 22%. I am off work, and still seriously ill, on 15 or more tablets a day. My family is worried, it is a super worrying time. I am focused on recovery, doing what must be done, staying calm as possible. I...

In the past, but increasingly less extensively, I would sum up each year that had been, since this blog began. This year, I paused, to reflect on what has meant the most to me. I set aside all anger, hate, hostility, cruelty, war and division in our world - there is too much of it, as we mostly all recognise; like many of us, I was saddened at particular deaths, lapses, losses - sometimes this year felt almost too much to bear. Escape - into an unreality, beckons more to us all, as the disposable, instant worlds of the digital realities, infused with fiction, play, lies and propaganda - is one way to cope. There is another, the more needle-sharp poignancy of trying to face, directly, the best in us, and sharpen our own lives, to their better edges. A struggle, to be sure. Like all humans, I strive to not succumb to my dark side, to my despair. The light is a two-edged weapon. Duality demands we decide, finally, what side we will come down on, who, and how, we will love. So I w...

2018 is likely to be considered a year that many people would soon like to forget. It had its fair share of war, murder, famine, refugees being mistreated or ignored, stupid polluting, cruelty and political ineptitude. Historically, the Western powers, especially the United Kingdom and the United States, have not been this weak since the 1930s, or in as much disarray. 2018 saw many notable and world-changing deaths and many not noted, not least the deaths of those lost at sea, or killed while reporting (every death is the end of the world, as Derrida once said) - mention here is due, at least, to those figures who touched my life in some small way (usually only with their works or words): Morgan Tsvangirai, Aretha Franklin and Stan Lee, William Goldman, Pete Shelley and Philip Roth, Margot Kidder and R Lee Ermey, Sir Roger Bannister and Stephen Hawking, Jenny Joseph and Reg E Cathey, Emma Chambers and Billy Graham, Johann Johannsson (whose Sicario score is an ominous masterwork)...

I am writing this first part on the eve of New Year's Eve day - and as new remembrances come to me, I may well update it. As the years go on, and this blog seems an interminable waste of time and fuss, and as my ego weakens its grip on me (ever too slowly to be sure) it seems less time is required to indulge my need for self-advertising. However, I do like to briefly report in such posts on things done and experienced. The highlight of the year is the time spent at Christmas with my family. No other part of the year is ever more meaningful, and I am always reminded how love shapes and supports my existence. Professionally, managing to keep my small indie publishing press afloat in a bad time for retail and literary publishing, was a major success for me. We published too many vital and important books to celebrate them all here, but two stood out for me, as being watersheds in our company's fortunes and esteem - The Monkman and Seagull Quiz Book - a good-selling en...

I have been leaving annual reports here since the first year of posts in 2005. I can't recall a stranger, more strong-tasting year, than this though. The current joke is "Fuck 2016". Indeed. I won't detain you with too many of my own personal experiences, achievements, blessings, in a year of madness and mass idiocy, and the rise of genuine evil - the year of Aleppo, the murder of Jo Cox , Brexit and Trump - the year we lost (my God!) Geoffrey Hill, Richard Adams, Carrie Fisher, the Greatest - Ali, George Martin, L. Cohen, Prince, David Bowie, Alan Rickman , Debbie Reynolds , and countless other beloved actors, comedians, icons, and friends. On top of this general sadness, general as the snow in Joyce , we lost Chris Moore , a young writer in his 30s, just as he signed his Eyewear book deal. His debut became posthumous. Awful. Then, more recently, a dear friend's wonderfully-vibrant 18-year-old daughter died in a car accident - days before Christmas.  Hell...

2015 was the year I left teaching at university level (at least for awhile) after more than ten years in academia, often as a senior lecturer. I turned my attentions to my own writing (poems, essays, a novel I am crafting, screenplay ideas), and mostly, to editing, and running the indie press Eyewear, now into its 5th year. About Eyewear, little need be said here, except we published over 15 books this year, and I am immensely proud of all of them - and of course we also had our pamphlet series, 20/20, shortlisted for the Marks Prize. And our Mark Ford book won the prestigious Pegasus Award from THE POETRY FOUNDATION, in the USA. Our two best-sellers of the year were books on the new Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn , and a book of poems by celebrated singer-composer Keaton Henson. Both have sold over 1,500 copies in a crowded Christmas market. We also published books by great poets like Sean Singer, Andrew Shields, Ruth Stacey, Mel Pryor, AK Blakemore, and E. Stefanidi, H. Knibbe ...

2014 seems like a very long year, and, like many moments of crisis, it is an event in two halves. My Swift Report is necessarily personal, even, it may appear, egoistic, or egotistical.  This is in the nature of such posts.  I can make no apology for this, the genre I am writing in here is memoir, specifically, a brief summary of "my" year. It is not, for example, a history of the year from the perspective of murdered young men in America; or victims of the mysterious plane crash; or the horrid Ukraine conflict; or a story of the victims of the Taliban; nor a jocular discussion of the adventures of Hollywood actors. It is not a story of Ebola victims or doctors, Winter Olympians, World Cup losers and victors, the struggles of Man United, or the return of Simple Minds . It is not a lament for the rise of the right, or the decline of the book.  In short, to reiterate, it is not a story of all of 2014 (if such were even possible), but of whatever the word "me" c...

Get ready to splutter with outrage and derision.  Here comes Todd Swift again, outlandish and fearless. In a year where one of the top memes was Jean Claude van Damme doing the splits between two trucks, and another was Miley Cyrus twerking, you might think I'd have been okay.  But 2013 was an odd year, as readers of this blog (and others) may recall, if only for me.  I want to start by saying that the act of writing such a summary is at once a harmless writerly act of sharing, and also an aggressive one of self-advertising, but it is surely not naively narcissistic. I write on the eve of the darkest day of the year, which seems fitting to me, because 2013 was a year that started bad, and gradually moved into the light - with the highlights being when I became British in Marylebone, and then celebrated ten years of marriage, on June 6. To begin with, my Grandmother, Melita Hume , died late 2012, basically early 2013, in the period just after Christmas - a sort of no ...

2012 was one of the most exciting, rewarding, and complex years of my life.  My wife Sara turned 40 in Marc h and we had a big party for her.  I turned 46 in April.  This was the year that I graduated with a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia (UEA) - surely the highlight of the year was that my mother came over for the graduation ceremony, and then we spent several weeks touring England together.  Also, this year, I had two books published - When All My Disappointments Came At Once , from Toronto's Tightrope Books, my 8th full poetry collection, and, as editor, Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam , preface by David Lehman , co-edited with Kim Lockwood .  I also had a poem appear in Best Canadian Poetry 2012 , a welcome honour. The launches for both books were wonderful; especially the Toronto book, because it meant I did a two-week tour of central Canada, in late October, and early November, where I met many old fri...

The London Underground Is Mine I'll keep this short.   The Swift Report is my looking back on the highs and lows of my personal life - not the great perturbations of the times.  As news retrospectives will attest, 2011 was an extraordinary year of deaths, collapses, uprisings, and economic shifts. This was the year I completed my PhD at the University of East Anglia; published my 7th collection, England Is Mine ; and edited, with Kim Lockwood , an anthology for Oxfam of young British poets, due out spring 2012.  I also launched a small press, Eyewear Publishing. I hosted some wonderful visiting poets, including David Lehman, Don Share, Jacquelyn Pope ,  and Ilya Kaminsky .  I saw my old friend Fabio Bagnara again, after several decades.  I hosted several readings for the Oxfam series.  And, at the end of the year, my brother, his wife, and my wee Godson, Alex , came to stay for Christmas.  We had a wonderful time. This was also the y...

It seems like a very long time since my last Swift Report - and this was quite a year.  The year when Eyewear THE BLOG had its fifth birthday. It began with my esophagitis out of control, and my being treated with an experimentally high dose of medication to control the production of acid in my stomach.  I was in pain all the time, and lost a lot of weight due to problems with digestion and not wanting to eat; I was facing depression.  I was off work.  Fortunately, an excellent team of doctors in London centered in and around Harley Street established the correct treatment regime, and I am much better a year later.  I've put on some weight again, and am no longer in physical pain.  I went back to work  slowly, part-time at first in the winter semester at Kingston, but by the summer was back to regular duties. In April I turned 44, in the desert of Oman - I had wanted to kick-start my turn back to health with an adventure holiday.  The beau...

The decade which has just passed was - arguably - the best and worst of my life. I went from being 33 to 43, a screenwriter with a hundred hours of produced TV to a teacher, and from health to sickness. Along the way, I lived in Budapest, Paris and finally London - all extraordinary cities where I made many friends, and had wonderful experiences. I was married to the love of my life, Sara , and still am. My father died, horribly, of brain cancer. Many other relatives died too: beloved uncles, an aunt, and my maternal grandfather. I became an uncle myself, when Alex was born. Good friends died also, such as Richard and Robert . This decade, I returned to university and received an MA in Creative Writing from UEA. I became a poetry tutor and university lecturer, first at London Met, then Birkbeck, then Kingston University. I recovered from a car accident (one arm could not move for a year). I became associated via Martin Penny with Oxfam as their poet in residence. And poetry - th...

I'll write my report in early 2010, and, not only survey this year, but a decade of work. In the meantime, may I wish you all a holiday blessed by health, peace, and love. As a veritable UK-style blizzard snows down upon London let me wish you a Very Merry Christmas!

In the past, these reports of mine have blended the personal with the public - and this year will be no different, except that I have less and less time for self-advertisement (though I am sure some followers of Eyewear will arch an eye at that suggestion). Basically, 2008 ended none too soon - it was a dreadful year in some ways. My beloved Uncle Jack went into hospital in December. Then, Jack died, three weeks ago. I plan to write about him more later - his loss is too recent. But let me just say he was my best friend, and poetry mentor, since I was a child, and his death is the death of a second father. So, what was the good of the year? I want to pause and note I have very good talented kind friends, and an extraordinary wife (who never appears at this blog only because she insists on it). I have, also, though this is often roughly-shaken, a faith, that, with stoicism as its backbone, and 21st century theology as its astringent companion, somehow muddles through. I continue to wa...