He was educated at St Asaph Grammar School and Jesus College, Oxford, where he read English. He has spent most of his working life buying and selling paintings, finally returning to matters literary in December 2015. He believes that poetry should strive to reach the parts that prose can't. He feels no shame at showing the influence of earlier poets, and deplores the deliberate isolation from the past seen in much "establishment" verse today. He admires the work of William Blake, G M Hopkins, T S Eliot and (especially) Sylvia Plath. His other interests are horses; dogs; reading (mostly historical); painting and paintings (especially mid to late 20c abstracts and abstract-landscapes); Georgian and some modernist glass. He has been a widower since September 2015.