Larkin and Us

Barbara Everett

  • Larkin at Sixty edited by Anthony Thwaite
    Faber, 148 pp, £7.95, May 1982, ISBN 0 571 11878 X
  • The Art of Philip Larkin by Simon Petch
    Sydney University Press, 108 pp, £5.95, September 1982, ISBN 0 424 00090 3

‘What days for?’ asks a poem in The Whitsun Weddings. It’s a good opening line, with that abruptness and immediacy most Larkin openings have. And it’s a good question, making it plain – among other things – that living is not really what poems do: they only chart the results of asking questions like these, bringing

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Vol. 4 No. 20 · 4 November 1982 » Barbara Everett » Larkin and Us (print version)
pages 6-9 | 9617 words