Score!

Poems. This collection plays on the tripartite sense of ‘score': in soccer, as a voting mark, and as musical notation. Many of the football poems were written while the author was poet-in-residence in 2004-2005 for Tottenham Hotspur F.C., and were published on the Spurs website, www.spurs.co.uk, in the Evening Standard, Guardian and Independent newspapers, and broadcast on the BBC World Service, BBC London TV and Radio, BBC Breakfast TV, BBC4 Woman's Hour, Capital Radio, Sky Sports News, BBC Northern Ireland, BBC Radio 5, BBC The World/Boston, SBS Australia and ABC Australia. The volume has intertexts in Tony Harrison's film-poem, v., Simon Armitage's ZOOM!, and Don Paterson's Nil Nil (also about football); but it brings a distinctive female gaze to bear on a traditionally masculine pursuit. It also brings elite literary culture into contact with popular culture to produce some easily communicated poems, at the same time as formally complex ones, such as the experimental three-hundred-line terza rima poem about the truth of poetry v. the spin of politics.