E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Ruth Siverns , once Ruth Bowman , the young fiancee of Philip Larkin , and the subject of some of his key early poems, has died, after a long life that went on without him, just as his poems do; it all seems very sad , somehow, this going on afterwards, and then again, not.

Are his poems on the Richter Scale? The August 20-21 weekend issue of the FT had an article by Martin Amis , on the poems of Philip Larkin , excerpted from his forthcoming Selected for Faber.  I am not sure why Larkin needs a Selected.  All his work is now available, and all is worth reading; nor is there so much of it to wade through, and he is the most readable of modern poets.  That being said, Amis, because of his father's close association with Larkin, is an intriguing choice of editor for such a book.  Amis makes the argument that Larkin is not so much a poet's poet, as a novelist's poet, because of his pithy lines, and his impressive imagery - though in fact effective image and metaphor, and memorable lines, have always been poetic gifts to the reader, and were only later borrowed by novelists. Amis is I think correct to cite Larkin as the great English poet of the second half of the 20th century.  Indeed, after Hardy , and Auden , he seems undeni...

I've just received my copy of Faber's Philip Larkin "lost recordings", The Sunday Sessions . It was a necessary purchase - after all, Larkin, for better and worse - is the face of non-modernist British poetry post-1945 - and is also one of the English language's greatest coiner of phrases. He's not a poet you just ignore, even if (as I do) you disagree with some or all of what he thinks about poetry. Still, I disagree with Pound often - but enjoy some of his poetry. Larkin's also something of a closet modernist himself (if one notes how much he drew on Yeats , Auden , Eliot and others). Anyway, imagine my surprise when I played the CD, and found that it was less than 46 minutes long ( 45 minutes, 20 seconds to be exact). The back of the attractive CD promises "Running time approx. 1 hour". Maybe in a Bangkok massage parlour, - but for this listener, "approx. 1 hour" should be approximately 60 minutes, give or take one or three. The...