Heather Brett and Noel Monahan - poet-editors - have been working on Windows Publications, from Ireland, for 20 years now, and have now published a celebration of this two-decades of effort to support local and wider poetry. Such work is usually thankless, so I thank them here. And note the anthology is worth buying, to support their work, and to read some very good recent poems by Irish poets known and new (perhaps) to you. I am in the book, I should add, which is lovely; many others too, including Paul Perry, Patrick Chapman, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Nessa O'Mahony, Pat Boran, Leland Bardwell and Medbh McGuckian.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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