Gavin Ewart

Why on earth ever did (I wonder) Shaw and Wells so much like Grayshott, and Conan Doyle, at Hindhead, build ‘Undershaw’ – when they might have got away, shot of all those dark and dismal conifers, those larches, spruces, pines, fishboney firs,

and gone on down Southwards, right on to the clear sea and sun of Sussex and the traditional naughtiness of Brighton, architecture...

After a reading in a Derbyshire school, the fifteens and the sixteen-year-olds are clustering round me (no fool like an old fool), the clevers, the athletics, the shys, the bolds, for me to sign their poem-photostats; I write ‘Best wishes to Clare; John; Clive; Maureen.’ These are their souvenirs – Bard Rock, Hippocrene beer mats – xeroxed to help them sort out what I...

The mouth can be quite nasty in a bite The lover’s pinch can be malicious too Legs kick, as well as tangle, in a bed

Words can be harsh and not console or rhyme Fighting is also love’s especial food Hands can enlace with hands or round a neck

The tools that pierce can be unyielding steel Attractive nails can score, like claws, the face Fingers can spread on...

Spring brings the joys of love to me and you. It stimulates the young child-murderer too.

Robert Garioch, the best poet in Scotland, is dead. The wit stops coming from that remarkable singing head.

Hemingway was a Wound-and-the-Bow writer but his mother thought he was a low writer and all that Oak Park puritan set didn’t...

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...