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Li Bai (702-761) is one of the greatest Chinese poets of the Tang Dynasty. His poems, Wikipedia tells me, celebrate “the pleasures of friendship, the depth of nature, solitude, and the joys of drinking.” I can’t pretend to know about Li Bai or to have read any other of his poems, but somehow (and I can’t remember…

We all know that eventually we will lose everything—our life, those we love, even our planet. And most days we lose something—keys, our voice, a friend, our place in the novel we are reading. Loss is a constant in our lives, and Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) tells us in this great poem that losing is an…

T S Eliot (1888-1965) is one of my favourite poets. I haven’t had to make the awful choice faced by those on “Desert Island Discs” of which one book would I take to the desert island, but it might well be Eliot’s “Collected Works.” You can never get to the end of Eliot—just admittedly as…

This morning I started reading Gavin Maxwell’s great book “Ring of Bright Water” in which he describes living alone on a remote Scottish coast and befriending an otter. Published in 1959 it captured something in the zeitgeist and became a best seller, and its magic has lasted. The book has already enchanted me. But I…

Dilys Rose (1954–) is an accomplished poet, novelist, and artist and a friend of mine. We have known each other since we were students together in Edinburgh in the early 70s. I’ve watched with pleasure, satisfaction, and even pride as her career has developed and read many of her books. She has recently produced a…

I had never read this poem until this morning, but I’ve read a collection of poems by William Carlos Wiliams (1883-1963). He was what the British call a general practitioner, who practised in Paterson, New Jersey, for most of his life. In this simple but deep poem he mocks the knowingness of doctors, particularly young…

I found this still, understated, and beautiful poem in my collection but with no name attached. I felt ashamed that I hadn’t recorded the author, but the gift of Google allowed me to find in seconds that it was by Helen Dunmore (1952-2017). She was born in the same year as me but is already…

Stag’s Leap, a collection of poems by Sharon Olds (1942-), tells the story of her husband of many years leaving and divorcing her. It’s her “masterpiece” and won both the T S Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. The poetry is beautiful. It doesn’t rhyme, doesn’t use any standard form, isn’t heroically quotable, and reads…

The greatest invention of the 20th century, I provocatively say, was “the good enough mother.” Being a mother is tough, and it makes no sense to aim to the “best mother in the world”: there can be only one, not that we can agree on the measurement. Fleur Adcock (1934), another favourite poet, captures beautifully…

A friend, an actor with the sense of beauty and of rhthym that can go with being an actor, ranks Theodore Roethke (1908-963) as her favourite poet. Various critics called him the greatest American poet, ahead of Walt Whitman. That seems to me to go too far. I have long known his poems, but I…