Ben Wilkinson

I've a new essay over at the North Sea Poets substack, addressing the decline of reviewing culture, the rise of the poetry prizes, artistic standards and integrity. It also recently featured in the TLS 's NB column . Winners and Losers: The Death of the Poetry Critic by Ben Wilkinson “Reading reviews of modern poetry is like attending a prize-giving in a small, caring primary school: everyone has done terribly well, it’s all absolutely marvellous.” So ‘Harvey Porlock’, the emboldened pseudonym of one Terence Blacker, reported on the efforts of poetry reviewers in the Sunday Times back in the mid-’90s. Granting the odd exception, you’d be hard pressed to argue otherwise, and things have only worsened since. Friendly encouragement for beginners is one thing, but once a poet is at the advanced stage of putting a book out into the world, i.e. tentatively but seriously offering their work for intelligent readers’ honest appraisals, donning the kid gloves and trumpeting th...

    from the publisher:   This ambitious new collection from poet and critic Ben Wilkinson finds its author experimenting with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue. Carefully crafted yet charged with contemporary language, the book brims with everyone from cage fighters to boy-racers, cancer patients to whales in captivity. Several poems unpick the preconceptions and prejudices that can inform so many of our encounters – with the world, art, and one another – while others take a sideways glance at everything from male depression to the history of meat-eating; from the philosophy behind athletic competition to surreal yet familiar emotions. Notable here are poems that wrestle with the mystery of failed and successful relationships, both providing moments of transcendence and despair. There are well-observed pieces about sport, particularly the rewards of running, from a noted devotee. Wilkinson has also been deeply inspired by the French symbolist poet Pau...

    Don Paterson: Writers and their Work ( Liverpool University Press , December 2021, hbk; December 2023, pbk)    Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain’s major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed analyses of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the ...

Never mind movements, schools and styles: fundamentally, there are two types of poet – those who see spirits, and those who just drink them. As Sean O'Brien noted when reviewing her Faber New Poets pamphlet in these pages in 2009, Fiona Benson is a sober, contemplative sort. But as her first full collection Bright Travellers reveals, she is as much drawn to the metaphysical as to the mystical, treating the poem as a kind of secular prayer. The opener, "Caveat", may be a terse appraisal of the cactus, its "moist heart" and "store of water / held beneath its spines" a working model of life's resilience in the face of inevitable hurt. But, elsewhere, a poem such as "Lares" is a full-blown hymn to the "small ghost" of a bird, conjuring this "noosed spirit of the eaves" as gatekeeper of a hidden world beyond our everyday outlook. Benson often draws on personal experience in her writing – wading "thigh-deep in polle...

 A new poem of mine features in the New Statesman Christmas issue, alongside two short poems by Alison Brackenbury and a new short story by Lawrence Osborne.     Read it above, or on their website .

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 .

If poems are like other people’s photographs in which we recognise ourselves, David Harsent’s writing catches us at our most vulnerable, vicious and unnervingly visceral. Reading through his back catalogue gives you the measure of his oeuvre: A Violent Country, After Dark, Dreams of the Dead, Mr Punch, Night . Stalking through an often nightmarish territory of half-apprehended horror and bleakness, the narrators of his poems survey human fear and frailty against the backdrop of an elemental, unforgiving world. Like a scene from a Hitchcockian movie, the worst always seems to be held just out of shot, all the more present for its apparent absence. Redemption and absolution are rarely on offer. Harsent may have a beautiful technical facility for language, its measure, weight and texture, but the ends to which it is put are as black as a darkroom negative. Salt is Harsent’s first collection since Fire Songs , winner of the 2014 TS Eliot prize. Its poems form a strange sequence of so...

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.  

Duncan Hamilton FOR THE GLORY The life of Eric Liddell: from Olympic champion to modern martyr 372pp. Doubleday. £20. The Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter Eric Liddell is a rare example of a consummate sportsperson who transcended sport. Duncan Hamilton’s portrait of one of Britain’s greatest track athletes serves as an important reminder of sport’s true value at a time when athletics is marred by scandal, big money and loss of perspective. Liddell will be familiar to many through the film Chariots of Fire (1981). He is perhaps better known for the race he refused to run – the 100 metre Olympic heat in Paris, 1924, on the principled grounds that his Christian faith forbade him to compete on the Sabbath – than for the 400 metre final of those same Games, in which he defied the doubters to earn a spectacular win. Born to Scottish missionary parents in China, Liddell had no sporting pedigree. He did, however, study at an English boarding school that forged an indomitable ...

Dubbed the “most popular poet in America” by the New York Times , Billy Collins has won countless admirers for his chatty, witty, wholly dependable poetry. At pains to welcome the reader with avuncular charm, he writes lines that are more serious than they seem, though by how much, you’d be hard pressed to say. Wry and self-mocking, his favoured territory is the suburban everyday – a pop song stuck in your head; people-watching on public transport; a “perfect” spring day – though he is most at home striking a knowing and self-referential pose, “looking every inch the writer / right down to the little writer’s frown on my face”. ‘If This Were a Job I’d be Fired’, quips the title of one poem, its narrator swanning off having penned the most inconsequential of verses. Philip Larkin would have surely labelled him the “shit in the shuttered chateau”. But while some critics have called Collins a philistine, there is a productive quirkiness to his poems, finding surprise and profundity in un...

Jade Cuttle gives her verdict on Way More Than Luck in the latest issue of The Poetry Review , in a critical essay that takes in two other debuts: Richard Scott's Soho and Zaffar Kunial's Us . It's clear that the love of the beautiful game extends to Wilkinson's poetics, for he embraces a variety of forms and modes of address. From formally dexterous sonnets and sestinas, to epistles and endearing confessionalism, this is a book that likes to keep the reader's on their toes. Something Wilkinson does well is navigate the dark abyss of clinical depression [...] from "going about / the tedium that strings our lives / together: paperchain people, / baskets lined under strip-lights" ('To David Foster Wallace'), to shivering over a beige Cornish pasty, "ticking over / before some godforsaken motorway service station" ('You Must Be Joking'), there is tenderness and touching honesty to be found in the darker moments he describe...

Back when The Poetry Review used to include caricatures, Paul Muldoon emerged from its pages as a rattlesnake. Sporting his trademark Dylan-esque barnet and NHS specs, his trickster’s tie wriggled from a hieroglyph-inscribed basket. The image sticks because it fits. For the past forty years Muldoon has danced to his own tune, snake charmer to slippery, sly, fun but also menacing poems, borne of precocious technical mastery and increasingly reckless imaginative abandon. Boyish wonder meets a cynical intelligence. Playfulness and seriousness blur to one and the same. In his best poems – and by now, the longevity of his 70s and 80s lyric masterpieces ‘Wind and Tree’, ‘Mules’, ‘ Why Brownlee Left ’, ‘Cuba’, ‘The Sightseers’ and ‘Quoof’ seem beyond sensible question – the rhyming panache and lexical grace lure you in. But so too do the brevity, the deceptive clarity, the eye-widening exactitude. Form and flawless execution jostle with a beady-eyed mischievousness and darkness, unpick...

As our new century has grown ever more peculiar and unpredictable, there has been something strangely reassuring about the arrival of a new book of poems by that impish treasure of American letters, John Ashbery. Ashbery didn’t quite publish a book every year in his final quarter century, but the past score have seen some 13 surface, a rate of productivity that would have made Paul Verlaine blush. Which would be great if – as we expect of our most celebrated 'experimental' poets – the abstract wordsmith were breaking new ground. But if the past couple of decades of reading Ashbery confirmed one thing, it’s that the late great man settled into a style so impressively self-parodic he almost looked like one of his legion of poetic imitators. Just as global warming becomes ever more physically manifest and unignorable, the creeping sense that, towards the end of his life, Ashbery was knocking out complete nonsense and passing it off as poetry simply because he could, is a concer...

If 2017 was a lean year for poetry, as someone has said, I can’t say I noticed. Daljit Nagra’s The British Museum (Faber) introduced a clear-eyed, politically incisive approach to the poet’s established facility for socio-cultural commentary, in poems as rangy and playful as ever. Among debuts, Kayo Chingonyi’s Kumukanda (Chatto) is every bit as good as I expected, from its unflinching negotiations with lingering racial divisions, to its playfully nostalgic hymns to mixtape assembly, as well as rap and hip-hop’s influence on the poet. Simon Armitage’s The Unaccompanied (Faber) also deserves a mention, negotiating our strange times through precise image-making, conversational wit and formal skill. For poetry pamphlets, business again is booming, with too many to list here (though The Poetry Business has the lion’s share; hence their recent Best Publisher win at the Michael Marks). But one that’s definitely worth seeking out is Al McClimens’ Keats on the Moon (Mews Press). McC...

From the thumping heartbeat of the distance runner to the roar of football terraces across the decades, Ben Wilkinson’s debut confronts the struggles and passions that come to shape a life. Beginning with an interrogation of experiences of clinical depression and the redemptive power of art and running, the collection centres on a series of vivid character portraits, giving life to some of football's legends. By turns frank, comic, sinister and meditative – ‘the trouble with you, son, is that all your brains are in your head’ – these poems uncover the beautiful game’s magic and absurdity, hopes and disappointments, as striking metaphors for our everyday dramas. Elsewhere there are tender love poems, political satire and strange dream worlds, in an urgently lyrical book of poems that take many forms and modes of address: pantoum, sonnet, sestina; epistle, confession, dramatic monologue. All are united by a desire to speak with searching clarity about matters of the heart. ...

In my poem 'Graft', the opening line is just a bit of reported speech. Something I heard said a while ago, by someone who'd never run competitively before, and who figured - or maybe just hoped - that athletes must stick with the sport because it gets easier over time. The truth of course, as any dedicated runner knows, is that it never gets any easier. Just faster. From there, the poem picks up the idea and runs with it. Where do our assumptions about success come from? Our dismissals of achievement? Why bother with anything that comes easily? What is it to run, to compete, and why do we exhaust ourselves and define ourselves by this pursuit? first published in METER #02, published by Tracksmith. Poem forthcoming in Way More Than Luck , due from Seren Books in February 2018.

My poem 'To David Foster Wallace', from the latest issue of The Rialto , is featured on the magazine's website.  Includes an incisive and attentive discussion of the poem's themes - especially the difficulty of writing about a writer of eclectic brilliance such as DFW - by Rishi Dastidar. You can read the poem, and the prose, here , or by clicking the image above.