He has been Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, a Royal Literary Fund Poetry Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and now lives in New Mexico, where he writes for the New York Times and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poems have appeared in the New Republic, Iowa Review, Hudson Review, Harvard Review, Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books. His novel The Lost City was Guardian Book of the Year in the UK. Most summers he teaches fiction and poetry in Loutro, Crete, at the World Spirit Institute (www.worldspirit.org). The red copper wine carafe endemic to Cretan tables is a highly unpredictable source. Out of it comes local wine that’s sometimes crimson, sometimes pink (not rosé, but truly pink) or sometimes yellowish-brown, and that more often than not tastes of blackberry juice mixed with a little vinegar. But just occasionally, you get a real surprise. The Old Phoenix Hotel stands on its own little bay on the barren, vertiginous shore of southern Crete, a half-hour walk from the village of Loutro – which is itself a sweaty, death-defying two-hour cliff walk from the nearest town, Sfakia.
