Ben Wilkinson

THE WRITE STUFF Award-winning Reds poet Ben is composing more verse about his beloved Liverpool FC Reds fan and award-winning poet Ben Wilkinson is composing a brand new short collection of verse dedicated to Liverpool Football Club's greatest players. Guardian book critic Ben, who was featured in the magazine at the start of the season, recently published a book of poems entitled For Real . Kitted out in the colours of LFC, the collection won the prestigious Poetry Business Competition, judged by University of Liverpool graduate and Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. More of this feature, and a new poem, 'King Kenny', in the Official Liverpool FC Monthly Magazine , issue 27, November 2014    

... So by these various roads we have arrived at a miraculous little form in which our human need for unity and discontinuity, repetition and variation, tension and resolution, symmetry and asymmetry, lyric inspiration and argumentative rigour, are all held in near-perfect oppositional balance. The sonnet might be one of the great achievements of human ingenuity; I hope it’s clear by now that it isn’t an arbitrary construct that poets pit themselves against out of a perverse sense of craftsmanlike duty – it’s a box for their dreams, and represents one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take. Poets write sonnets because it makes poems easier to write. Readers read them because it makes their lives easier to bear. from 101 Sonnets (Faber, 1999)