When poets disappear

Some of my favourite poetry books of all time are anthologies. Not the headline selections everybody has (and has to…

Seven Ways of Reading Gillian Allnutt

Seven Ways of Reading Gillian Allnutt: How The Bicycle Shone: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe; 216pp; £12) 1 It’s…

I treated myself to Seth Godin‘s newish book The Icarus Deception recently. It is both dense and light, profound and easy to…

I wrote here a couple of days ago about my aversion to using war metaphor to describe cancer. Judging from…

A friend of mine drew my attention via Twitter this week to an article detailing Robert Peston’s thoughts on his…

Nine days after I was told that my chemotherapy treatment was not working in April 2006 the doctors discovered the…

I came across Michael Symmons Roberts‘s ‘Ultramarine’ during a stint as poetry editor for Third Way magazine. Like nearly everything…

I want to live – Sharon Olds The most intense reading group I ever belonged to wasn’t really a reading…

Seven years ago this is what happened halfway through my treatment for non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I went for a midway scan…

Sometimes you do not get a poem, or what a poet is up to, straight away. In the case of…

One of the pleasures of being alive is reading John Ash. Think of a prize-winning poet, someone you think of…

Apart from e e cummings and the genius Anon, one of my chief discoveries in the Voices and Junior Voices series that I…

I I first came across e e cummings’s ‘in Just’ in an anthology, Wordscapes, edited by Barry Maybury (OUP, 1971).…

I first encountered Siân Hughes‘s poems sitting around a table with some talented teenage poets at the Arvon Foundation‘s writing…

As I say in my previous blog post, I owe my knowledge of ‘8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970’ to the…

I first came across ‘Birth of the Foal’ at the recommendation of the great Cliff Yates. He told me he’d been…

The funniest thing you will ever read about Elizabeth Bishop (or teaching, or anything else) is Mark Halliday‘s essay Moose…

Here is a revelation: I did not always adore the work of Frank O’Hara. I had pause to consider why…