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.
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...
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...
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...
Spring brings the joys of love to me and you. It stimulates the young child-murderer too.
Bad News in April 1981Robert Garioch, the best poet in Scotland, is dead. The wit stops coming from that remarkable singing head.
A Rough Ballad of Old ChicagoHemingway 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...
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...
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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