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“... No doubt the modish thing today would be to give Betjeman the same label that has been stuck on Gavin Ewart: ‘a deeply serious poet’. That is the mechanical accolade, the last infirmity of contemporary clichés. Its irrelevance consists in the fact that no good poetry can be other than serious, whereas poetry written to be serious today is seldom ...”

“... I plan/100 100-word units’) are necessary to cope with the disintegrating subject-matter. (Gavin Ewart recently published an amusing parody, ‘The Peter Reading Poem’, which consists of a few expletives tacked together with metrical blanks.) It is as if a brain surgeon were to turn vivisectionist and perform a delicate operation on a patient ...”

“... the first rules is never to offer anything for free. In the New Statesman’s Weekend Competition Gavin Ewart once mistakenly implied that the actor Roland Culver was dead. Mr Culver – whose name had only come up in the first place because it rhymed with ‘vulva’ – threatened to sue for potential loss of earnings. Page refused to let the Weekend ...”

“... John Peet ended up as head of the Reuters bureau in Berlin, before defecting to the East in 1950. Gavin Ewart, whose poems now seem the high-spot of Out of Bounds, went to Cambridge with an exhibition to read classics; he left Wellington with some farewell verses in celebration of onanism, incurring a presumably superfluous three-year ban on crossing the ...”

“... of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ manifesto.In his new collection, Late Pickings, Gavin Ewart has nicely parodied the sort of thing that the Review symposiasts had in mind:‘How to write a poem in the American style’                  Use the                two-word ...”

“... and compassion in these pages, along with such recognised poets of high accomplishment as Gavin Ewart and Henry Reed, Norman Cameron and Robert Garioch, Roy Fuller, Hamish Henderson and Sorley Maclean – and many others wholly unknown to fame. It’s true that sensitive annotation of individual experience was the hallmark of their generation of ...”

“... John Strachey (Oswald Mosley was best man); second, in 1935, Chester Arthur III, known as Gavin Arthur, the spoiled grandson of the 21st American president. Both men seem to have married Murphy – dubbed by New York papers the ‘Bachelor Heiress’ – in some portion for her money: Strachey (from whom she was soon divorced) to finance his ...”

“... have an effortless interest which is met at more intensity in his own best novels; Gavin Ewart’s affectionate ode is almost ideally deft; Alan Bennett’s implacably wary set – piece (‘Why not something more along the lines of a biscuit barrel?’) makes one laugh a good deal more, or more festively, than most festschrift items ...”