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“... diminished. There were, and still are, alternatives to Larkin. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison are powerfully present in these books, as are a number of the poets Motion and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol ...”

“... We see poems that helped establish the reputations of James Fenton and Craig Raine; poems by Heaney and Lowell; and Peter Porter’s ‘An Australian Garden’, which counts among his best things. Of the short stories, ‘Solid Geometry’ is a reminder that TNR played host to Ian McEwan when he was still regarded as a fairly nerve-wracking guest. But ...”

“... later transpires they got the wrong flat.)19 August. In Karl Miller’s Tretower to Clyro Seamus Heaney keeps putting in an appearance either in person or via his poems. ‘Two Lorries’ has to do with a ‘tasty coalman’ who fancies Heaney’s mother, and another coal-hole poem, ‘Slack’, is about the coal dust used ...”

“... the small and the ordinary are to us’ he is engaged in a slightly different business from Seamus Heaney, whose ‘subject matter was ordinary’, but they might both claim a kind of realism which is the fulfilment of an ethic, like the Dutch school of painters whose work Carey prefers to other visual art, as he says in his memoir, ‘because it took ordinary ...”

“... publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But in this too, oddly enough, one can fail to find Larkin: because the desire to make tribute tends to move the stress ...”