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.
Bony skeletons in coffinwood, some of them bad, some of them good, all of them silent, stretched out straight, hope to get in at Heaven’s Gate.
Some had breasts to drive men wild or (more important) to feed a child; some had redhead cocks, to crow; now they lie there, row by row.
Everything soft has drained away, hard and simple till Judgment Day they lie still in their mouldered...
My old eyes tell me they are offering claret!What a most marvellous, unheard-of prize!Alas! dementia sapiens non caret*Poetic fame in such a Bacchic guise!Much money too! A poet in a garretno longer needs to starve, as cold he lies!Who wins? A Browning? Or a hot Miss Barrett?… that is beyond our wildest wild surmise!
£5,000! For sure, the lucky winnerwill be, untaxed, the Poet Of...
Love jumped on us before we knew his name, twisted our arms at prep schools, hid up our mothers’ skirts, oh! we were bent by knitted bosoms and that ladylike scent!
Love was a tyrant in his belted shorts, was good at games and comely just as the Bible said, behind the scrum a hardworked angel – no wicked words like bum.
Love came, not physical in any way; demanding friendship...
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...
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...
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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