Tag: Lifesaving Poems

When one poet rescues another poet

I came across Hubert Moore’s fantastic book of poems The Hearing Room (Shoetstring, 2006) via my friend and neighbour Lawrence Sail. In … More

Lifesaving Poems: Yorifumi Yaguchi’s Praying Mantis

Readers who have followed my Lifesaving Poems series will know by now that there isn’t and wasn’t a plan about … More

Why I miss Robert Rehder

It is odd to speak of missing someone you never met, but this is how I feel about the American … More

Lifesaving Poems: Billy Collins’s ‘Morning’

  In February, 1999 I was sitting in a car park with Naomi Jaffa when she asked me what I … More

When poets don’t appear

I have been thinking a lot recently about the career trajectory of poets, including my own, whose work briefly becomes visible … More

Lifesaving Poems: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘No worst, there is none’

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

On reading poetry to dying people

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

Lifesaving Poems: John Ash’s ‘The Middle Kingdom’

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

Lifesaving Poems: Carl Sandburg’s ‘Buffalo Dusk’

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

Lifesaving Poems: e e cummings’s ‘in Just’

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