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“... Byron’s Problem When they come up to you, as you’re sitting quietly, and lay their fat boobs on your knees, and look into your eyes with their own big eyes and wistfully caress your cheek and so, without speaking, say ‘Please!’ it’s a clear invitation to come out and play and you can’t just tell them to go away! When the wine’s round and they press up against you gently, it’s much like a musicless waltz as they talk about books (and they all write books) – that’s foreplay, nothing else, my son, true sex; it’s the talking that’s false! But you can’t make a snarky and sharpish riposte, with words like ‘Forget it!’, ‘Get lost!’ When they stroke your hair too, and finger your coat slyly, or lay a neat hand on your shirt, they all cast you as Faust (and they all know Faust), each one’s a Gretchen, maiden, pure; but they all want your hand up their skirt ...”

“... Catwoman Tattooed Thief Prowls Streets In Tony Neighbourhoods, Eludes Police for Years. American news item. All words in italics are quoted from this. James, the yardman, was working out back,   Maude, the maid, was tossing a salad – what better beginning, if you’re having a crack   at writing a criminal ballad? And I do want to make it plain: Atlanta’s notorious Catwoman had struck again ...”

“... in the doorway In cloak and hat as if he was some part    Of the performance. Our memories, Gavin, Will retain your own appearances at parties,    Standing, as you preferred, in some quieter corner – Forever Ewart’s! The last time we talked at one,    It was prosody, New Verse, and the Café Royal We ...”

“... other good poems he likes that could truthfully be said to do more than mention localities. Gavin Ewart is a very good and very readable writer of verse which, if not ‘light’, is not heavy either. If, therefore, his Penguin Book of Light Verse is less wholly pleasurable, even less admirable, than Geoffrey Grigson’s now nearly ten-years-old ...”

“... dropped a taipan (Oh what a kakemono!)    On her tatami.    The term congeries Given by Gavin Ewart –    Jellied eels I’d thought.    Zoomancy (four Syllables please note) as when    Cats augur earthquakes.    Kin to yin and yang Lingam and yoni are less    Metaphysical.    Odalisques, frillies Frou-frous – and ...”

“... 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, possibly with a certain wry exasperation. Generally speaking, our fondness and admiration for poets does go with a potential of patronage or dislike, a pleasure in our sense of the absurdities and vulnerabilities of their worlds – Keats blushing to the ears as he writes raptly about womens’ waists; Eliot going on about his delicate apprehension of time and God, not hoping to turn again, and so forth ...”

“... to a poet seeking approval in Britain as to come from a sunny clime, and George MacBeth’s and Gavin Ewart’s books are likely to have to answer to the charge that they lack a vision of evil. Poems from Oby would have us believe that the poet has finally, at 50, come into his own, thanks in part to his acquisition of a rectory and two and a half ...”

“... Fitgerald – not, however, to be found in the body of the book. Why Ian Fleming and not, say, Gavin Ewart? Why Alfred Noyes and not Olivia Manning? Why not both A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble? Doubtless for all sorts of reasons. Why Tannhäuser and not Parsifal? Why summarise The Shaving of Shagpat and not Living or Loving? However, a measure of ...”

“... in 1977, Larkin published only four poems – two rather charming birthday poems (one for Gavin Ewart, the other for Charles Causley), a poem about a dead hedgehog, and a couple of stanzas specially written for a Poetry Review special number on poetry and drink. After his death in 1985, a handful of unpublished poems was found. The strongest of ...”

“... swoops down, with her terrible ‘caring’ voice, on the stricken village or town ... This is Gavin Ewart, who adds: If you’re accident-prones you may hear those dread tones and meet that baleful eye! There are also substantial essays on our political culture, on economic and social policy, on defence and foreign affairs. Collectively, what they ...”

“... of shy alcoholic confidence, that The Unquiet Grave had ‘made’ him. It certainly inspired him. Gavin Ewart described it as ‘the Great Missing War Poem of World War Two’. Perhaps Logan Pearsall Smith had come close to writing the War Poem of World War One? The indirections and resonances of art, particularly the kind of conscious verbal art that ...”

“... Apart from Thwaite himself, the few who are spared include figures like Vernon Watkins, Gavin Ewart, Barbara Pym: allies who are genuinely liked and admired but who are nonetheless junior to Larkin in talent and repute. The really big hates tend to be reserved for sizable poetic rivals. Ted Hughes is a recurrent, near-obsessive target, with ...”

“... balladry by Macaulay and Thackeray and Belloc, and altogether too much Phyllis McGinley. MacNeice, Gavin Ewart and Enright are woefully underrepresented, and the omission of anything by Mr Grigson himself is a real loss, though ‘milder levity’ may not be his most salient feature. The refusal to ‘define’ satire, welcome enough in its way, does not ...”

“... Kipling libretto, Baa Baa Black Sheep, for Michael Berkeley. Blake Morrison is, with the composer Gavin Bryars, engaged on an operatic version of Jules Verne’s story, ‘Dr Ox’s Experiment’. Gavin Ewart has provided saucy verses for Robin Holloway’s opera buffa about sexuality, Boys and Girls Come out to ...”

“... do write light verse. Leithauser has a lightness of touch and a grasp of received forms such as Gavin Ewart might envy, as in his four-line ‘minim’ on unrequited love – Your lungs expand; you’re smitten –   She’s gnawingly beautiful; Before long the nail’s bitten   Right down to the cuticle – but he also has Zen-like powers of ...”