Ben Wilkinson

Prior to this season’s emphatic campaign, Liverpool last won a title when I was five years old. Like many, I’m still processing the complex emotions associated with season after season of hope, belief, despair, frustration, vindication and determination that now, finally, have lead to the prize that has so long eluded a club built on winning in the decades leading up to my birth. From the outside, football can be — like so many things — caricatured, misunderstood, and easily dismissed. But it remains a guiding passion for many precisely because its twists and turns, tragedies and euphorias, reflect the human dramas of our own lives. As Bill Shankly quipped: football is not a matter of life and death; it is much more important than that. No one right now will understand that more than the two Liverpool captains pictured here. Steven Gerrard is a Liverpool legend for so many reasons: his devotion to his boyhood club despite the lure of silverware at other clubs through the 2000s and

I recently wrote an article for the Boston-based running outfitters Tracksmith : As a poet who also runs, I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking and writing about the connections between athleticism and art; how both are competitive but ultimately solitary, joyful yet defiant, demanding resolve and routine, but also reflection. So how can poetry, or simply writing creatively, help a runner right now? You can read it in full on their journal .

Two new poems feature on Wild Court : one after a painting by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, the other after spending a good deal of my life watching too much tennis. You can read 'The Flower Carrier' and 'The Champion' here.

My poem 'The Nightingale', a loose version after Paul Verlaine (1894-1896), is the Times Literary Supplement 's Poem of the Week. Wilkinson’s quatrains, too, have more room in them for emotional explanation than  Verlaine ’ s terse couplets, which bite off each image and snap shut on any recollection of tenderness. Read the full introduction by Andrew McCulloch, and the poem, here.