To celebrate the tenth birthday of Eyewear Blog - a major literary milestone in British poetry history perhaps (or not) - its spin-off sister, Eyewear Publishing is offering a £110 poetry prize for the best ten line poem using imagery in relation to eyewear, vision, opthamology, or something to do with monocles, glasses, glass eyes, eye patches, or optomosterists, including eye charts... and those tests that put a puff of air into your eye - ouch! Just email the poems as word docs within BEFORE MONDAY MAY 25TH to EYEWEAR TENTH BIRTHDAY POETRY PRIZE to info at eyewearpublishing dot com. Please share and retweet peeps!
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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