Gavin Ewart’s first collection, Poems and Songs, appeared in 1939; his next, Londoners, didn’t appear until 1964. More than a dozen followed before his death in 1995.
When they come up to you, as you’re sitting quietly, and lay their fat boobs on your knees, and look into your eyes with their own big eyes and wistfully caress your cheek and so, without speaking, say ‘Please!’ it’s a clear invitation to come out and play and you can’t just tell them to go away!
When the wine’s round and they press up...
Evening News, Edited, Printed and Published in Scotland’s Capital City, Saturday, 15 August 1987
There’s a wee Evil Spirit abroad in a wee West Lothian family, a wee Invisible Force has attacked, with a knife, a girl lodger – slashed the wee girl with a knife, causing terror and turmoil in Dedridge! Along with her three wee sons, Mrs Avril Perkins is frightened. Her lodger,...
Pope and Keats were nothings, only two feet high – all the enormous Sitwells were towering to the sky.
Edith once told Bottrall physical size was all – miniature masterpieces weren’t on, by anybody small!
All long, or little, poems by Thwaite or Taner Baybars are bound to be a waste of time and, you might say, lost labours.
No chance for midget madrigals – the Muse...
When I see yet another work of hagiography concerning Sir John Betjeman, it makes me want to vomit! Show me, I want to say, please, the ‘geography’ of the house!1 But Betjeman wasn’t nasty, in fact very far from it.
It’s probably the Murrays who are such penny-turners (Byron’s one was a Philistine). John’s an important asset, one of the few real genuine...
Those who said that they loved us are terribly dead or not quite right in the head or they went missing thirty years after the last passionate kissing,
gone, with no phone calls or letters; with other mates; you could say they...
A more sophisticated version of Larkin’s cry ‘Foreign poetry? No!’ is the belief that the poetry of certain parts of the world (Eastern Europe, for example) is intrinsically...
Anthologies are coming from the publishers with the speed of Verey lights from a sinking ship. What could he better: six hundred pages of other men’s flowers, offering relief from what...
Towards the end of Gavin Ewart’s delightful and comfortable volume there is a poem called ‘It’s hard to dislike Ewart’. Too true, as Clive James or Peter Porter might say,...
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