Tony Harrison RIP. Cracking poet

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New on the Writer’s Bookshelf: eight questions about writers, books, and reading with the brilliant @ravoon.bsky.social - featuring Ted Hughes, John Updike, Penelope Fitzgerald, Zaffar Kunial and much, much more!

What to do with a book so cynically produced? www.thetimes.com/culture/book...

Sly self-mocking self-assertion in Larkin's 1981 interview with John Haffenden: ‘Poems don’t come from other poems, they come from being oneself, in life. Every man is an island, entire of himself, as Donne said.’

This, from welovestornaway.com is my favourite news item about the Forward Prizes so far... @niallpoetry.bsky.social

I've read this: extremely readable, wise about a ljfe in poetry, funny about the biz, humble about failure and rejection, humane about fellow poets - I really enjoyed it.

Love this - Kurt Vonnegut on his sister Alice, a painter:

OUT NOW. Issue Twenty-One: Long-limbed Darlings badlilies.uk/issue-twenty-1

A really good opportunity here to study Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia: the Birch Family Scholarship is available to a home fees applicant who has applied for a place on the Poetry MA and identifies as a writer of colour. Deadline 1 August. Please RT! www.uea.ac.uk/study/fees-a...

Top top poetry content in the inaugural issue of Free Bloody Birds, edited by Alan Jenkins and Declan Ryan. Including new poems by @sheribenning.bsky.social, Ange Mlinko and Karen Solie, Mark Ford on Auden's Hardy and @bdralyuk.bsky.social on Peter Reading. freebloodybirds.com

Over three years after he died, with alcoholic dementia and liver cancer (leaving behind still-unresolved administrative disasters), I am beginning to see him whole, and can bear to think about him again. I wrote about his last year as he died, angry, terrified, and largely alone.

This poem, 'John Clare Reaches the Pacific,' is very dear to my heart and I'm thrilled to see it in print in the summer issue of @nimrodjournal.bsky.social thanks to @bdralyuk.bsky.social. I wrote it on an Amtrak from Portland to LA in September 2022, from which I really did see a lot of pelicans.

Remembering Jack Quinn (1938-2025). Poem by Justin Quinn.

Fascinating audio here of TSE - : tseliot.com/foundation/1...

I'm not an expert on Geoffrey Hill, but this doesn't really sound like him

We think of Richard Wilbur as elegant and urbane (he was) but he could also do horror - horror elegant and urbane.

Am astonished to find this 89th in a 1995 BBC book, The Nation's Favourite Poems

A poem-prayer worth spending some time with, brushing out the knots, and learning by heart

On Americans in UK poetry - in which I like some more than others... www.thetimes.com/culture/book...

What's the best love-poem written in English this century? Dunno - but I'll start with "Song" by Tracey K Smith (published 2011)

Please help! Does anyone have a copy of this 1986 Carcanet Book - and could photograph the contents page?

Very grateful to @kg520.bsky.social for this generous reading of my work...

Always worth reading

No Times paywall this weekend, so if you're tired of poetry reviews full of careerist flattery, hyperbole, and log-rolling, and you want something honest and independent, have a look at my work from the last few years... For example - www.thetimes.com/culture/book...

Niall's lovely piece here reminds me of a favourite poem from his last collection - at his best, he is Heaney-esque.

This is great, especially that last paragraph

Issue twenty: 'Side A/Side B'. OUT NOW at badlilies.uk

Not sure about that title, but the new mag from Al and Dec will be well worth a look. Hofmann, Solie, and Boris, among other delights...

If you’ve never read a sentence that gets worse with every word, try this description of Donald Trump Jr’s organisation Field Ethos, from its website. The last line is the coup de grace.

I save all of my old to-do lists so that on judgment day I’ll be like, Well as you can see I was too busy to do anything compassionate and often too busy to refrain from doing bad things also because bad things help me relax

This late Simic poem reminds me a bit of Causley's 'Eden Rock'. I admire both poems immensely, particularly as my own last picnic draws closer.

Michael Longley's death has sent me back to his friend, Seamus Heaney. This is my favourite Heaney poem - about how love is generous, enlarging and opening the heart.

Michael Longley

The conclusion to my review of Michael Longley's last Selected Poems, "Ash Keys" in the Times last November. Farewell to one of our greatest lyric poets.

CW: domestic violence. Poem of mine that appeared in Poetry Review as well as my collection, Panic Response. It's an elegy for a teacher called Avril Brown who was very kind to me, and who deserves to keep shining.

I’m reading the Internet Library 1st edition. It has photos. archive.org/details/chap...

The last 3 lines here are unimprovable - I find this an incredibly powerful and musical description of what happens when a parent dies - from a genuinely brilliant collection, ignored for shortlisting by all major poetry awards.

YES. To Wæpnedhád, Anglo Saxon god of male virility.

The TSE prize continues to surprise me - I wanted Gboyega Odubanjo to win. So odd to choose Peter Gizzi, a Whitmanish straight old white man. Follows the Forwards in giving the main prize to an American. I won't rest now until Pam Ayres gets a Pulitzer.

Some nice poems here (and one of mine)

Criticism that's critical is worth reading. Enjoyed this from the excellent @dominicleonard.bsky.social - thelondonmagazine.org/review-song-...

Good old LRB pages

M.R. Peacocke's work should be better known...

My Dad's been dead a while now, so I am surprised by how keen I am to go to the pub with him, and try and make him laugh. One more time.

This is lovely!

Trevor Phillips in the Times makes a good case for studying poetry in depth - it might make you less of a cretin.

Only straight white male poets now is it? Tsk, Guardian - www.theguardian.com/culture/2024...

My only Christmas poem - one for the grumpy Dads...