My research specialisms are Irish writing, Welsh poetry, and British / US poetry, especially modernist poetry, more broadly. I am the leading authority on the work of Dylan Thomas and the author / editor of five books on the subject; in this capacity I have worked with and as a consultant to: the BBC, the Arts Council, the National Trust, Aardman Films, the OU, the British Library, British Council, etc. I'm also a poet and translator of poetry (to date, from Italian, French, and German), with a strong interest in non-anglophone poetries. I have an interest in the visual arts and modern art music, and this is reflected in several collaborations with composers and artists. As an active arts organiser, I have organised poetry festivals, edited poetry anthologies and magazines, run a poetry press, and curated and presented poetry reading series.

I was born and brought up in Kingstanding, in north-east Birmingham, and gained an English BA degree (1st Class Hons) at Hull University in 1977-80, and an English MA and PhD (on modern Irish poetry) at Leeds University in 1981-82 and 1983-86 respectively. In 1985 my first poems were published in Pennine Platform and my first poetry pamphlet, Before the Flood, was published in 1986, winning an Arts Council Bursary. I worked for the Leeds City Council Disabilities Unit and as a part-time A-level tutor before my first university post, a 3-year lectureship at Leeds University. I taught there for two years before moving to work at University College Cork, where I taught from 1990-94. As a result of experience gained in a Leeds poetry workshop with Ian Duhig and John Whale I was a major prizewinner in the Arvon/Observer poetry competition in 1990 and I was one of ten poets was included in Faber's Poetry Introduction 8 (1993). While still at Cork I was invited to read at the International Poets' Festival at Coimbra, gave invited papers and lectures for the British Council in Granada, Jaén and Göttingen universities, and at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin. In 1994 I was offered a lectureship at Swansea University and returned to the UK. At Swansea I was heavily involved in the 1995 Swansea UK City of Literature programme, reading my own work with Miroslav Holub, and introducing readings by Paul Muldoon among others. completed and published my first full-length poetry collection, A Birmingham Yank (Arc, 1998) and published the monograph Irish poetry since 1950: from stillness into history (MUP, 2000). My interest in Dylan Thomas was launched in 1998 when I co-organised a conference on his work in Swansea, the outcome of which was a joint-edited title in the New Casebook series (Palgrave, 2001).

In the 2000s I co-edited the Irish Studies Glossary (Edward Allen, 2003), and thereafter concentrated on work reflecting my interest in other literatures, and on my own poetry: I published a translation of Heine's Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Smokestack, 2005), and (with Tom Cheesman) of Adel Guémar's État d'urgence (Arc, 2007), which won a P.E.N. award. I also co-edited and introduced No soy tu musa: Antología de poetas irlandesas, with Carlota Caulfield (Ediciones Torremozas, 2008). I won first prize in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2006 with 'The Uncles', which has been anthologised in the Forward Best Poems of the Year (Faber, 2008), Best Poems of the Decade (Faber, 2015), 100 Prized Poems: (Faber, 2016) and Stories of Ourselves (CUP, 2008). I was also first prizewinner in the New Welsh Review / Aberystwyth University Prize (2009). I published a Cageian mesostic writing-through of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems, uncaged sea (Waterloo, 2008), and founded a poetry performance troupe, Boiled String, to perform and record it. Boiled String became a publishing imprint in 2010-20 and pioneered the publication of neglected innovative Welsh poets, such as Peter Meilleur (Childe Roland); my chapbook Wine Night White (2010) was among the 15 titles it published. In the same year I published Illennium (Shearsman), followed by The True Prize (Cinnamon, 2011). The No Breath (2017) and The Ars (2020) are my most recent poetry books, with collections forthcoming from Oystercatcher and Aquifer. Aside from writing, I spent September 2018 teaching in Tianjin and made two ERASMUS exchanges with Köln University (2018, 2019); organised a successful Hallam-based zoom launch of the fifth notebook on 27 October 2020; this year curated and introduced an anthology of innovative Welsh poetry for Blackbox Manifold magazine (#25) and organised a zoom event for 3 poets in it for the Sheffield University Centre for Poetry and Poetics (22 April 2021).