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Alan Hollinghurst is best-known for his Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty (superbly adapted for television by BBC Drama), a forceful yet sensitive novel about the private life of Nick Guest, a gay man living with a friend whose father is a Conservative MP, and the public and political world that he lives in. You can see already that there are likely to be a few tensions there. The novel is narrated in the third person but everything is filtered through a single consciousness, that of Nick Guest. We see, feel and hear things as he does, meaning that there is no real reason why it is not written in the first person aside from the very fact that it shows the two the public and the private roles of Nick in their full and differing lights, and of course, as a Jamesian stylistic device – Nick is about to start a PhD on Henry James’ style at UCL – it all fits.

The first of Hollinghurst’s novels, The Swimming-Pool Library is a courageous and powerful expose of gay life in Britain during the 1980s. William Beckwith, the young aristocrat of leisure, flits from swims at the ‘Corry’ (the Corinthium Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street), expensive bars and restaurants, to public lavatories in Hyde Park to pick up men. It is on one on the latter expeditions that he finds himself literally picking-up Charles, Lord Nantwich, an elderly man who also swims at the Corry. The novel focuses on the friendship between these two gay men and how they are separated in their experiences as homosexuals: legislation of homosexuality in 1967 meant that Charles’s life as a gay man was criminal, whereas Will’s is hedonistic and unshackled (up to a point). It transpires that Charles is after someone to write his biography, so he approaches Will to ask if he would consider writing up his diaries about his outlawed gay lifestyle. Will is less than enthusiastic about this request and at first is unwilling to commit to such a task, for reasons that the pages of the novel gradually and hesitatingly unfold.

It seemed at first a monstrous request, although I could see it was quite reasonable in a way. If he had had an interesting life, which it appeared he had, he could not possibly hope to write up himself now. If I didn’t do it, nothing might come of it. It was partly because I idly disliked any intrusion into my constant leisure – my leisure itself having taken on an urgent, all-consuming quality – that I instinctively repelled the idea. But it was not, after all, impossible.

However, as he begins to read the diaries, he becomes immersed in a world of nostalgia, finding the trembling of illegality and old-fashioned camaraderie appealing but also becomes increasingly aware of the idealisation of memory, realising that his own context is far from idyllic: Will gets attacked by a gang of youths for being “a fuckin’ poof” and a friend of his is arrested for soliciting a (secretly gay) policeman. Things are perhaps not all that different from 1967.

Set in 1983, the year before the knowledge of Aids was upon us, there is a sense of hope for the future and a reckless devil-may-care approach for the present. Yet the knowledge that we (and Hollinghurst) possess about Aids, imbues the novel with tragic irony: the circle of this promiscuous lifestyle is undoubtedly going to be broken, as it is more than likely that Will is HIV positive through leading the life he does. The last words of the novel capture this entirely:

It was very quiet at the Corry, when I arrived mid-afternoon. The few people there looked at each other with considerate curiosity rather than rivalry. There was a sense of various different routines equably over-lapping. There were several old boys, one or two perhaps even of Charles’ age, and doubtless all with their own story, strange and yet oddly comparable, to tell. And going into the showers I saw a suntanned young lad in pale blue trunks that I rather liked the look of.

The novel teeters along the edge of idyllic romanticism and gritty confession through credible writing that is beautiful, humorous and candid. The success of The Swimming-Pool Library works not only in its parallels between the life of the restrained homosexual and the liberated one, along with the ideals that each has about the other, but also through the rendering of incredible physicality: concentration on bodily vanity, sex, exercise, violence and beauty, making the human form displaced from the idea of the personal. Physical acts are rendered either superficial or detrimental. Sex is something that can be demanded and withheld, whereas love and affection are things that seem impossible to retain, or even get a grasp of. Ideas of hedonism and hope are juxtaposed with those of nostalgia and constraint. At points in the novel Will feels utterly helpless, with both James (his lover/best friend) and Charles being victims of male promiscuity laws but importantly, Will gives life back to Charles literally in the first part of the novel and, in the writing of his memoirs, gives Charles back a part of his life that had long been kept in the shadows.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

Patrick Kavanagh, who died forty years ago today is one of the best-loved of all Irish writers and was effectively the first poet of the newly independent Irish State. He had an honest, unpretentious writing manner which contrasted firmly with that of his intimidating predecessor, W. B. Yeats. The literary critic Seamus Deane has described him, shrewdly, as “a bare-faced poet, without masks” and, thanks to those characteristics, “revolutionary.” Growing up in rural county Monaghan, in the unfortunately-named town of Mucker, Kavanagh experienced firsthand the humdrum hardships of rural life. These feature in his novels, The Green Fool and Tarry Flynn and also in his most important and ambitious poem, ‘The Great Hunger’, which begins with memorable menace:

Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill …

To pursue his literary career Kavanagh moved to Dublin where he lived a precarious, free-lance life, occasionally drifting into journalism. A rough, lumbering man he had a memorably abrasive manner, acquiring enemies and admirers with noticeable ease. These days, Irish artists receive generous treatment from the state but this was not so in the 40s and 50s. To make ends meet, Kavanagh was often reduced to borrowing from friends and similar humiliations. My father, who knew him slightly, remembered how Kavanagh once responded to a greeting in the street: “I’m off to dinner with a fool,” he growled, “the company will be bad, the conversation will be worse — but the food will be mighty.” Kavanagh’s generation of writers, which included Flann O’Brien and Brendan Behan, was mired in an outwardly genial, but ultimately scabrous, poverty. Kavanagh was frequently ill. Indeed, his sequence of Canal Bank poems, which most Irish children first enjoy at school, was penned after a period of hospitalisation. These poems reflect a new mood in his work, a quasi-Buddhist acceptance, which he described simply as “not caring.” ‘Canal Bank Walk’, for example, opens with a gorgeous labial waterfall:

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me that I do,
the will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.

Celebrity and financial support eventually caught up with him, but, as he put it, “too late.” The final stages of his career were marked by a literary and medical decline. Not that this did anything to diminish his effect on such later luminaries as Seamus Heaney. Kavanagh’s influence is profound — but its nature is not technical so much as it is existential. He showed how it was possible to write about the most crashingly mundane aspects of Irish life while putting to one side the romantic mystifications of the Literary Revival. He is seen, now, as a kind of secular saint: rooted, realistic, and entirely un-pious. “I don’t like the poems of Patrick Kavanagh”, said the Dublin poet Paul Durcan, “I believe in them.”

By John Redmond

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John Redmond is a lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His first book of poems, Thumb’s Width (Carcanet) was published in 2001 and was longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award. Recent poems deal with computer games and car culture. They also reflect a period of teaching in St. Paul, Minnesota (2001-3). He is also the author of How To Write a Poem (Blackwell, 2005).

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British children are not reading as much as they used to and in particular they are not reading for pleasure. So says the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. Children are apparently spending a third less time reading than six years ago and the most able children are leading the downward trend. This piece in The Guardian outlines the main points.

As might be expected the most vocal commentators on the report have been from the opposition parties, notably Michael Gove, the Shadow Children’s Secretary. I have quite a lot of time for Gove, whose witty enthusiasm for the arts makes him an entertaining reviewer. The Conservatives have made a big play of this decline in reading, but their response, which mixes up reading as an activity with reading as a skill, misses the point entirely. Here’s Michael Gove:

We are falling dangerously behind other countries and we know that those from the poorest backgrounds are suffering most. It’s time the government stopped blaming parents and accepted the case we’ve been making for a new focus on teaching reading using tried and tested methods, with a test after two years in primary school to ensure our children are being taught properly.

What he’s talking about here is literacy as a skill; something employers like and which affects our economy and competitiveness. But ‘tried and tested methods’ do not make passionate readers or smart, well-informed citizens. They may well produce people who can read, but only in the sense that people need to learn the tried and tested methods for tying their shoelaces.

What is needed is not more testing and key stage whatevers, but teachers and parents and politicians who care about reading and want to show how great and how modern it can be. How it fits in with the other things in childrens’ lives. The current report pits books against computer games as if they were somehow in competition. In reality they are not but many readers–teachers, politicians, worried parents–have failed to see that pleasure in reading does not preclude pleasure in other things. In some contexts the computer game, rather than the book, might be just what you need.

Here’s what I mean. At a Reader Food For Thought event a year or so ago I was seated with a secondary school teacher, who complained with some force that her students did nothing but play computer games and were not interested in reading. I asked her what they were playing and she told me that she didn’t use computers and that she didn’t care what they were playing. That’s a mistake. Of all people teachers should understand what students are doing, even if they don’t like it themselves. When children see reading as less worthwhile than gaming, lashing out at gaming is not going to make the kids put down their Wii. We need to make the case for books, not against computers.

I for one would like to see Britain become world champion nation at sitting in an armchair reading big miserable books. But the Opposition plan to focus on the method rather than the excitement of reading will do nothing to change a national attitude that goes against reading as something worth doing. Of course there is nothing wrong with improving the teaching of reading in schools, but going easy on parents is only useful as a vote winner. I was talking to an affluent, educated woman about children and television the other day. She said to me ‘Thank God for TV: without it you’d have to read boring books to your kids all the time.’ That’s what we’re up against and testing at six ain’t going to fix it.

Posted by Chris Routledge, Powered by Qumana

Issue 28 of The Reader magazine thumped onto the office doormat today (I’ll be fine, really) and we could not be happier with the new look of the magazine. The attractive new design, the appointment of our new editor, Philip Davis, our new website and this new blog, means that there have been many changes within The Reader Organisation lately. But the same passionate commitment to reading and to reaching serious readers everywhere remains at the heart of it all.

We aim to be THE literary magazine that no serious reader in the country should be without. You don’t want just poetry, you don’t want just short stories, you don’t want just essays and reviews, you don’t want just book recommendations. You want all these things and you want them with passion. That is The Reader for you, newly designed, ready to take off.
Philip Davis, Editor

Featured authors in Issue 28 are David Constantine, Josie Dixon, Patrick McGuinness, and Erica Wagner; new regular contributor Ian McMillan of The Verb, kicks off his first column with childhood reading memories: and there is an interview with actor and book collector Neil Pearson.

For highlights and contents of the magazine, click here.

To subscribe to The Reader, read the whole issue all and marvel in its glorious new design, visit our shop.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

In posts during October we introduced Mersey Care Reads, a joint project between The Reader and Mersey Care NHS Trust, which aims to set up reading groups for service users across the Trust. The project is now well under way, with nine groups currently in action and a host of training sessions taking place for Mersey Care staff members and volunteers who have come forward to facilitate ongoing groups at the end of the project.

One of these groups is based at Crown Street Resource Centre, part of the adult mental health service provided by Mersey Care. The group got off to a terrific start back in October, with the support of Martin Maxwell, an enthusiastic member of staff who invites service users and joins in with the group each week. He is one of those taking on the Key Professional Training and will continue to facilitate the reading group after the twelve month project finishes. The group of eight have got to grips with a whole range of material since then, including Simon Armitage poetry, a short story by Chekov and (with Christmas fast approaching), Dickens. Our time is split into two 45 minute sessions with a 15 minute tea break in the middle. We usually start and finish by reading a poem together, reading either a short story or chapter from a longer book in between. In recent sessions we have read sections from Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island focusing on the chapters on Manchester and Liverpool. Bryson is fascinated by Liverpool’s history and writes about the present state of the Dock area of the city with an ever present longing for the old glory days of hustle and bustle.

I was appalled to think that never in my life would I have an opportunity to stride down a gangplank in a panama hat and a white suit and go looking for a bar with a revolving ceiling fan. How crushingly unfair life can sometimes be.

As we read this, members of the group recalled their own memories of the dockland, the ‘past’ which Bryson suggests dominates Liverpool’s future. One gentleman told us:

My Father worked at sea, and when he was home, he used to take me for a trip on the overhead railway on a Saturday morning. I used to draw pictures of the ships, it was wonderful. Once he took me on a tour of an Indian Destroyer, I’d never seen anything like it!’

We talked about the idea of Liverpool as ‘a place with more past than future’. Most people disagreed with this: ‘You need to have memory and a link to the past, but you take that and use it for the future’ said one group member. The idea of ‘using’ past experience, perhaps especially, the negative, to create a positive future was something which we picked up again in the poem The Road Not Taken. On reading this, one gentleman commented, ‘There are things that happen in your life that you may regret, but if they hadn’t happened, you would have missed out on things. You don’t know what will happen to shape things. If I hadn’t been in a car crash years ago, I wouldn’t be sat here today’.

This week we started reading A Christmas Carol. It is the first reading of this story for everyone in the group, although a couple of people have seen various film adaptations. There was a lot of debate about the character of Scrooge himself. After reading the first few pages where we are given an impression of Scrooge and his solitary existence one man suddenly said

I think he is lonely. Sometimes when you don’t see people you don’t feel like you want to be integrated with them. It’s difficult. That’s how I feel and I think it is how he feels here.

Another group member replied:

I don’t think he feels lonely. I think he is lonely, but he doesn’t feel it, or doesn’t know what it is.

We talked about the idea that you could be lonely, but not know it yourself and how terrifying that would be, because it might mean you would never be able to escape the loneliness. ‘If you could get through to Scrooge and make him see, that would be wonderful!’ someone exclaimed. We battled with the relationship between Scrooge’s apparent hatred of people, warmth and joy, and his strange contentedness with his situation. This led us to question: Is Scrooge happy? ‘I think he is happy with his version of happiness. But I don’t think it is a very good one’ was one answer which made another member of the group stop and say ‘That’s interesting. I think that’s right. Its not a good one’. Everyone is very keen to find out whether anyone can indeed ‘get through to Scrooge’ during the rest of the story and we are well and truly ‘hooked’ and looking forward to reading further in the next session in order to find out the answer!

By Katie Peters

On the evening of Sunday 9th December, at St George’s Hall in Liverpool, The Reader is hosting its fourth annual Penny Readings event.

This year, the event features renowned UK poet Jenny Joseph; The Archers star Annabelle Dowler; and BBC Radio 4 and CBeebies presenter, David McFetridge; the 500-strong audience will hear readings from such famous classics as Bleak House, A Christmas Carol and A Winter’s Tale.  Other highlights of the evening include performances by the Liverpool African Youth Dance group, three community choirs, a Dickensian trumpet player and a string quartet.

The Reader exists to promote the good in literature, believing that reading can be fun, life-enhancing and creative for everyone, and this is why we host The Penny Readings. As in Dickens’ day – when he would travel around the potteries and Liverpool, reading to thousands of people for only one penny – we too only charge one penny for this event, so that it is inclusive and available to all. We want everyone to benefit from the positive impact that literature can bring to people’s lives and this is one thoroughly enjoyable way that we are able to do it.

You can read the full press release on the University of Liverpool’s website. Tickets are now sold out for this year’s event but you are can place your name on a list at Liverpool Central Library to ensure you are amongst the first to know when tickets go on sale for 2008.

Next year we are thinking of putting one hundred of the tickets on ebay in order to add excitement to the scramble for tickets and raise money to support the event. A penny for your thoughts, please.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

The Reader’s outreach project, Get Into Reading, was kick-started by Melvyn Bragg’s Radio programme In Our Time. I was driving through the north end of Birkenhead (if you don’t know those happy fields imagine a wasteland among the worst indices of deprivation in Europe) listening to Melvyn’s guests discussing something or other, when one of them said ‘it’s the Prospero effect, isn’t it?’ and all agreed, yes, it was, without needing to explain to each other what the ‘Prospero effect’ was because they all knew: Shakespeare, literature, was something they had in common and, I suddenly understood, it gave them a language for thinking. It was at that point that I realised it was necessary to get great literature out of the University and into Liverpool’s North End and other socially, economically, pschologically and educationally devastated areas. Six years later,through Get Into Reading, The Reader has 50 weekly read-aloud reading groups doing just that.

I still occasionally listen to In Our Time in the car and had the best radio pleasure of the year this week when Melvyn hosted a show about Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poem, The Prelude. It wasn’t the erudite discussion, though that was mildly interesting, nor Melvyn Bragg’s faux-naïve questioning. (Was William a big head? I loosely paraphrase). No, it was biographer Stephen Gill’s warm and measured reading of an extract from Book Two of the poem that really got me. Stephen Gill’s accent is a lovely deep black-country+Oxford don combo, and you can feel a lifetime of loving Wordsworth in the reflectively steady walking rhythm his voice gives these great lines. It’s not often you can feel love and thought coming out of your car radio but don’t take my word for it–listen to him here. Or try it yourself–read aloud but very slow and steady:

But ere the fall
Of night, when in our pinnace we return’d
Over the dusky Lake, and to the beach
Of some small Island steer’d our course with one,
The Minstrel of our troop, and left him there,
And row’d off gently, while he blew his flute
Alone upon the rock; Oh! then the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream.

Here’s the link to the In Our Time page. You can subscribe to the programme’s podcast here.

Here’s the link to Stephen Gill’s reading.

By Jane Davis

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On November 26, 1731 the English poet and hymnodist William Cowper was born. Cowper trained as a lawyer but became increasingly troubled. He suffered from several bouts of depression, attempted suicide more than once, and was declared insane for a short period in the 1760s. He is now best known for his hymns, which include some of the best-known lines in the English hymnal, including this from the Olney Hymns:

GOD moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

Cowper was a fine poet and though he was often didactic to the point of sermonising, like many evangelicals of the time he was unafraid of confronting authority and siding with just causes. This sonnet to William Wilberforce demonstrates his non-conformist sympathies:

Sonnet to William Wilberforce, Esq.

Thy country, Wilberforce, with just disdain,
Hears thee, by cruel men and impious, call’d
Fanatic, for thy zeal to loose th’ enthrall’d
From exile, public sale, and slav’ry’s chain.
Friend of the poor, the wrong’d, the fetter-gall’d,
Fear not lest labour such as thine be vain!
Thou hast achiev’d a part; hast gain’d the ear
Of Britain’s senate to thy glorious cause;
Hope smiles, joy springs, and tho’ cold caution pause
And weave delay, the better hour is near,
That shall remunerate thy toils severe
By peace for Afric, fenc’d with British laws.
Enjoy what thou hast won, esteem and love
From all the just on earth, and all the blest above!

Posted by Chris Routledge, Powered by Qumana

Somehow this time of year always feels right for a good dramatic adaptation of a Victorian novel, just as it always feels right that the adaptation should be on a Sunday evening. Last year the BBC gave us a gripping adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House; last Sunday they gave us the first instalment of Cranford, the drama serial that was very nearly cancelled two years ago. The adaptation takes in not only Elizabeth Gaskell’s mid-nineteenth century novel Cranford, but also the closely-knit communities taken from the writer’s novella My Lady Ludlow, the short story Mr Harrison’s Confessions, and one of her articles entitled ‘The Last Generation’.

Gaskell’s novels Mary Barton and North and South etched themselves upon my consciousness almost mythically: all those hard talking and hard living resilient characters of the great industrial North and the towns where the struggle for life and love is played out against a backdrop of unprecedented social and political upheaval. But I have not had the pleasure of reading Cranford. I am therefore writing this review from a certain disadvantage but also free from the need to weigh the film against the book. And I say, from this perspective, that I enjoyed the first episode in the serial a great deal.

In this first episode of Cranford, Judi Dench (who plays an immediately loveable Matty Jenkyns) and Eileen Atkins (who plays an equally loveable if not significantly more sombre Miss Deborah, Miss Matty’s elder sister) gracefully set the tone for the small Cheshire village of 1840s Cranford. It appears as a village governed by strict but respected codes of stern decorum and self-composure, but which also ripples with a communal spirit of shrewd wit and fortitude from a predominately female community.

Its sprightly rebellious spirit reveals itself in various concealed moments throughout the normal run of everyday life. In one amusing moment, at an evening supper of oranges where the Jenkyns sisters have great difficulty working out how to eat the exotic unruly fruit in a manner fitting to the decorum of Cranford. Miss Mary Smith (played by Lisa Dillan), a newcomer to Cranford, timidly suggests that the sisters make a small hole at the top of their oranges and suck the juice out of them. Needless to say, Miss Deborah is left speechless and Miss Matty timorously explains that her sister does not care for the word suck. The solution is to retire to their own rooms to eat their oranges in silence; we see them indulgently and mischievously sucking on their oranges in private.

Two other outsiders from the village also herald the beginnings of change and modern ways into the quaint rural village. A dashing young doctor Frank Harrison (played by Simon Woods) shocks the village by wearing a red (rather than the traditionally conservative black) coat in public. But when Jim Carter (played by Andy Buchan), the local joiner in the village, breaks his arm falling from a tree during one of his jobs, Dr Harrison wins approval by refusing to follow the normal procedure of amputation and successfully carries out a new medical practice he had been taught in London.

Meanwhile, an imposing Captain Brown (played by the spectacular Jim Carter) moves in over the road from the Jenkyns sisters. Captain Brown causes great discomfort and embarrassment to a reserved and stolid Miss Deborah with outspoken reference to his financial difficulties. When Captain Brown is called away on business Miss Deborah bravely ignores the conventions of Cranford to accompany his daughter Jessie (played by Julia Sawalha) on her bleak solitary walk behind her sister’s coffin. Captain Brown manages to win the affection of his neighbour by hand-making the sisters a new coal shovel as a thank you gift.

I think the BBC’s Cranford will win an avid audience this winter. Even my partner admitted to enjoying it and he would much rather watch Top Gear on a Sunday evening than anything remotely resembling ‘just another bleak boring period drama’. We perhaps expect the slow quiet but nevertheless emotionally charged rhythms of a past village community to appeal to an older generation. I know that my grandmother would have watched Cranford on Sunday, just as she watched Bleak House last year and was afterwards inspired to buy the book. But to also appeal to that particular niche of young adult males, who only read FHM and would normally run a mile from anything remotely resembling a serious novel, is surely something of a feat.

By Clare Williams

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The poet Vernon Scannell died last weekend aged 85. He was a prolific writer: eight novels, autobiographical memoirs, works of criticism, children’s books and several collections of poetry and yet it seems he was not as well known or as highly rated as he certainly deserves. My fellow Reader editor, Brian Nellist is a long time admirer of Scannell’s poetry, likening him to the school of Thomas Hardy finding in his work something of Hardy’s consciousness of cruelty but with a warmth and tenderness. Brian points out that he is an active rather than a reflective poet though led to the reflective by particular incident as in his poem ‘Incendiary’, which we chose as one of the poems for discussion in The Reader’s Food For Thought event earlier this month:

and frightening, too, that one small boy should set
The sky on fire and choke the stars to heat
Such skinny limbs and such a little heart

Or in ‘Ageing Schoolmaster’ reflecting on the huge inevitability of his own death:

Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,

And rollicked round the playground of my hours,
And wonder when precisely tolled the bell
Which summoned me from summer liberties
And brought me to this chill autumnal cell

He was, like Hardy, a craftsman poet. Language fits and operates in harmony within the tight framework of his verse and he was concerned with and interested in form. Extraordinary physical images spring out at you from the poetry. Even so it is still surprising to learn that he was once a boxer, earning a living in fairground fights. This was following a deeply troubled army service in WWII. After witnessing the results of a massacre in North Africa,

Disposed in their scattered dozens like fragments of a smashed whole, each human particle/ Is almost identical, rhyming in shape and pigment, /All, in their mute eloquence, oddly beautiful (‘Remembering the Dead at Wadi Akarit’)

he deserted, only to be caught and imprisoned. He was later released to take part in the D.Day landings where he was wounded and once again ran away. While on the run, he changed his name from John Vernon Bains to Vernon Scannell but in 1947 he was caught and sent to an asylum as an alternative to prison. He was a man who lived life to the full and much of that experience of love, violence and death is reflected in his verse. Perhaps his most famous poem and one of the greatest poems of the Second World War is ‘Walking Wounded’:

A mammoth morning moved grey flanks and groaned.
In the rusty hedges pale rags of mist hung;
The gruel of mud and leaves in the mauled lane
Smelled sweet, like blood. Birds had died or flown,
Their green and silent attics sprouting now
With branches of leafed steel, hiding round eyes
And ripe grenades ready to drop and burst.

To hear the rest of the poem read movingly, in gravel voiced seriousness by Scannell himself, visit the Poetry Archive.

If you would like to read more of his work, Collected Poems 1950 – 1993 is available from Amazon.

On the back cover of this collection, Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory says: ‘you actually want to go back and revisit the poems many times. Their shrewd structures hold their elements firmly in place and they resonate also with the kind of humanity time is generous to…’

I can think of no better tribute.

By Angela Macmillan