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“... A dog-lion’s haunched triangular fury guards the dead. He says, ‘several things: first I bite, then in death I guard you.’ ‘Besides, I don’t want it,’ I said. ‘Then forgive me.’ ‘I’ll guard my own death,’ I say. So then he bites me. Meanwhile a little swooning in the blood. I tell this dental fool, ‘I am the right, and fierce creature, the insects gnaw my veins, my newly rived flesh, I find the Jew in the scrolls, I nourish him,’ and I dispossess him like a father ...”

“... A Gypsy Moth holds a castle of bruised rose in its sights, the engine beating like a moth’s wings, but the moths beat against or tumble over the walls, across beams of light, on glass, and in the windows – their sensors, their furred heads, winged bodies with a burning sense of the bulbs naked over the readers. Lightly they wipe their webbed flesh on our cheekbones, and we imagine ourselves winged ...”

“... For gas the house waters carbide, often meagre for burning, though our lungs cough up a shred of acid that we sicken on. Up at plastered stone, flaky and gravid, the sheep butt: smudged with an orange dye wool inside mist wastes at the mothy house. Then gas heaves. Quick, turn the spiggots, across their limp flow, igniting this powdery whiteness damped to gas, a flame that looms, raising a brightness edged in a dark blister to a light shaped like a woman ...”

“... In a Trailways, shaking over red clay, wild poor shapes hang in a sulky wind of glazed polythene. As we start, a child bellows softly, she mews at her mother’s breasts pressed up into the v of an ill-made blouse. The gaze is cheerful, her repose her daughter’s sleep, father unfolding in it like the soiled shapes of duster he cannot sell. The planted rows, the dead all men, their adversary stain bruised like mulberry on red clay ...”

“... dad’s the only one keeps up his front. Congratulations to the anthologists, Peter Redgrove and Jon Silkin, for culling ...”

“... symbolically quasi-human and flickeringly active, as in a newsreel of the period. Like Middleton, Jon Silkin is very much his own man. An active propagandist for poetry, he nevertheless belongs to no ‘school’, although I would guess that somewhere along the line he absorbed the influence, for example, of the Minnesota poets, Robert Bly and James ...”

“... and who surely exemplifies not only the ‘democracy’ but the ‘pluralism’ they refer to, is Jon Silkin. Having commended the growth of poetry journals and publishers outside London, both O’Brien and Armitage/Crawford proceed to ignore the poet who founded Stand magazine, and whose poetry and personal presence – both of them sane and principled ...”

“... The following year, he wrote to Madeline about an event he had done, attended, he said, by ‘Shit Silkin’, i.e. the poet Jon Silkin. When The Barracks was adapted for the stage by the playwright Hugh Leonard, McGahern wrote to his US editor: ‘The tart’s name is Hugh Leonard, did Stephen D. once, and several cheap ...”

“... so often someone would buy the thing. A lot of this was going on in those days. The figure of Jon Silkin, for example, would arrive in Oxford with copies of Stand in a holdall and he would go round the colleges and people would condescend to him dreadfully. His forbearance and patience as he went about trying to sell it used to impress me. So I ...”