- Dark shadows,
- childhood traumas,
- the close presences of the dead,
- and above all the omnipresence of death throughout life;
all these elements recur throughout his poetry, fiction and memoirs.
The volume characteristically includes personal losses (‘In Memoriam’, ‘The Art of Dying’), finding the corpse of a run-over badger (‘Uley Blue
’),
as well as the memory of his own near drowning: ‘what I remember best is the water’s answer, / the shadow it left in my blood when it let me go / and the tug in my bones that remained, like a scar, or an echo, / concealing the death I had lost’ (‘Learning to Swim’).

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The relationship you had with your father has been well documented in both your memoir A Lie About my Father, and some of your more confessional poems. Did writing about him help you make sense of the trauma he brought to your own life?
You try to make sense of it beforehand, and then it seems to be interesting enough to start exploring it as a piece of writing. I wouldn’t have been able to write the memoir you mention if I hadn’t worked through the material before I started writing. I sat down to write the book because I discovered the central secret of the book: which was that that my father was a foundling, he was found on the doorstep.
Then he was passed from family to family. So this was the final fitting into place of the jigsaw in my head. Before that I had just been angry and hated him because of how he had behaved, but when I began to understand more of the details, I began to imagine what his internal life might have been like

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One of the things many journalists report is your assertion [in “Waking Up In Toytown”] that you once saw the devil at the bottom of a Pot Noodle bowl. How do past experiences influence your work, or the way that you see the world?
It wasn't once, it was frequently—and not just the Devil, but all kinds of images that, for me, at that moment, were real. I was in and out of hospital and medication regimes for a while, and that was oddly interesting; eventually I diagnosed myself as having apophenia—a kind of extreme tendency to find sometimes beautiful and sometimes terrifying patterns and images in seemingly random phenomena. I also had many very vivid auditory hallucinations at that stage of my life, and I have drawn on that history—you might say of a usually high-functioning, though sometimes catastrophic form of madness—in my writing. I think it is necessary to talk about experiences of that type.
Throughout my life, especially as I have grown older and perhaps saner than I was, I have become more and more convinced that the one good enterprise we are all charged with, the one really vital adventure that living offers us, is to learn to unpick the fabric of the false world-view we have been given and, so, to become wilder and more true to ourselves and to the world as it really is, and not as our parents and teachers and self-appointed leaders would have it seem. To become ungovernable, as it were. Seen in this light, my mental condition—which was for a long time, and occasionally still is, a state bordering on, or countering what the societal norms call madness—could be thought of as a gift. An odd kind of gift, no doubt, but maybe it taught me to refuse certain compromises