Good news. The first woman (and Scot) to be named as the British poet laureate is Carol Ann Duffy. As one of the leading and most popular of UK poets, whose reach is both wide and deep, hers should prove an excellent decade - and her first act, of giving away the annual fee, isn't bad either (though it might have been useful for travelling around to events, and it isn't clear that Britain really does need yet another annual poetry competition....). I worked with Duffy when she donate poems to the Oxfam Life Lines poetry CD project, and she was extremely generous with her time.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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