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    

If one of the most liberating moments in a writer's life comes with the realisation that lyric poetry allows you to make things up, the true revelation occurs when this deliciously sinful inventiveness delivers, somewhat paradoxically, the most eye‑opening and heartrending truths. Dear Boy , Emily Berry's first book of poems, is immediately striking for its sophisticated awareness of such artifice. Opening with a darkly comic account of life as a dramatised and scrutinised performance, the collection presents a host of surreally reimagined everyday scenes in which speakers and characters, by turns emotionally, intellectually and physically compromised, perform accepted, expected and imagined roles. "'Time for another / caffeine fix methinks!'" proclaims one, half intent on reinventing herself, before confiding that "I am not allowed coffee / because of my nerves, but the biographer doesn't / know this". Much of Dear Boy reads as a...

POETRY IN MOTION Why one Reds supporter is committing his love for Liverpool FC to verse Liverpool FC and poetry have a lot of previous – from John Toshack’s Gosh It’s Tosh collection in the late 70s, to the verse of Dave Kirby and Peter Etherington in the fanzine Red All Over the Land , to the lines written by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, a University of Liverpool graduate, in the aftermath of 2012’s Hillsborough findings. Now there’s Ben Wilkinson, Reds fan and book critic for The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement , who’s compiling a series of poems commemorating the club’s legends. “Football is part of the fabric of life, and anything that’s important to people finds its way into poetry,” he says. “Wilfred Owen’s poem 'Disabled' describes a soldier who loses the use of his legs, meaning he can never play football again. Philip Larkin’s 'MCMXIV' compares boys queuing to join the army to fans outside Villa Park. These poems have stood th...

A look at Roddy Lumsden 's ' One Acre Yard ' Where are we? The poem has brought us to a large yard in Fargo, the biggest city in North Dakota. It is April, we are told; our poet and his companion have “missed the thaw by days”; Spring has come late. The yard, we find, is burdened with feelings that go unspoken – washed-out and fatigued like the vowel sounds in its “narrow palette / of oatmeals and ochre”, it is also redolent of a loitering loneliness, as “only the spruce / busks its darkness down each limit”. So the scene is set, the wavering light in those browned yellows against a dwindling, clinging darkness. We feel like we have been here before – not exactly here, but somewhere remarkably similar: that same sense of an imperceptible yet soon-to-be seismic shift; that same taking stock when we hadn’t quite intended or expected to; these wavering feelings beginning to settle. Clearly, we are at the edge of a very specific moment – “all that has fallen these months...

As the poet-critic Nick Laird recently pointed out in a review of the poet’s letters, the influence of Louis MacNeice is everywhere in contemporary poetry. His sprightly, masterly way with form and his sprawling themes – the blurring of past and present, personal and public, darkness and light – have made an impact on some of the best-known British and Irish poets currently writing. Paul Henry may be an unfamiliar name to some, but like the work of many of his better-known contemporaries, The Brittle Sea , his new and selected poems, owes much to the Belfast-born “laureate of in-between-ness”. This hefty volume takes in twenty-odd years’ worth of work, selections from five collections and a batch of new poems, yet like an intricate Venn diagram, all are linked by their abiding themes: how the past haunts the present, and how people and places change, as do our relationships with them. Despite their MacNeice-ish content and formal bent, however, stylistically Henry’s poems are oft...

from an interview with Michael Donaghy by Conor O'Callaghan, 1997 CO'C: On a topical point, Allen Ginsberg died recently. He was somebody who made a career out of opposition to mainstream poetry as embodied by Hecht and Wilbur. How do you value his work? MD: It's possible now, in American schools, to take an exam on Allen Ginsberg and fail it. There's a market for being opposed to mainstream culture. I don't want to say anything about poor Ginsberg now that he's dead, but there was a time when he'd shock everybody at poetry readings by taking off his clothes and running around the stage. Towards the end of his life, he would sit there quietly in his tweed suit, while people would give lectures on his work. Early on he liked to give the impression that poems like Howl were written rapidly in a fever of Beat improv, when in fact they were carefully worked out in successive drafts. And I have no problem with any of this, my only problem is with the sel...

Jeremy Reed, West End Survival Kit , Waterloo, £10, ISBN 9781906742072 Michael Schmidt, Collected Poems , Smith/Doorstop, £18.95, ISBN 9781902382005 Jenny Joseph, Nothing like Love , Enitharmon, £9.99, ISBN 9781904634843 Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Inroads , Seren, £7.99, ISBN 9781854115119 Sheenagh Pugh, Later Selected Poems , Seren, £9.99, ISBN 9781854114976 Any poet worth their salt, as Michael Donaghy once noted, “tries to tell the truth by working truly.” Not by conforming to reified concepts of ‘fact’ or ‘actuality’, of course ( but this is what actually happened! ), but by being true to themselves, the reader, and the world they construct within a poem, however surreal or fantastical. The linguistic sense of a poem is a measure of this, ensuring that, rather than a private act, poems become a shared communication of recognisable truth, whether literal or imaginative. In short: you give a good poem a shove, and it always bounces back. The poems in Jeremy Reed’s latest collection certain...

Home Only there, the afternoons could suddenly pause… Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Stafford Afternoons’ I try to imagine it differently, coming back to this town, its streets the same except for shops unemptied, a book store not bought out by Waterstones, or the Ancient High House not leaning forwards, its bulging Elizabethan plaster and timberwork. But as the train shuttles down the West Coast mainline and I shift my head to gaze into the gloaming outside – a paperback of Acrimony on the table to pass the time; the girl opposite eyeing it with suspicion or interest – I’m woken by the town’s lit-up landmark; that castle built from wood, then stone, then again and again until it was left in the ruins that remain and its stock of earthworks. The station’s empty in pools of orange light. This , I think to myself, won’t be the last time I wander bleary-eyed past the silence of the Bird in Hand, a bunch of kids skittering their BMXs round McDonalds or the small miracle ...

So here’s the thing: I actually got hold of a copy of Shiver , Alan Buckley ’s debut pamphlet of poems, not so long after it deservedly grabbed the PBS Pamphlet Choice back in 2009. They say a week’s a short time in politics, and the same can go for poetry: so much stuff is published these days, half the time you can barely keep up, and that’s just with the kind of thing you enjoy, never mind the whole broad canvas. (Or at least I can’t anyway, and sincerely hope / suspect I’m not the only one). Marketing exacerbates this, of course: sure some of the best poetry comes from those imprints that are part of a much bigger commercial enterprise, but in the media fuss that can sometimes surround the big players’ literary stars (relatively speaking, like; this is poetry after all), you can often end up missing out on something very special put out by the smaller indies. As an occasional reviewer, this can be doubly frustrating: by the time you find out about / get around to properly rea...

Remember that poem right at the end of Don Paterson’s God’s Gift to Women (1997)? The last in the book’s muddled sequence of poems that take their titles from the defunct Dundee-Newtyle railway line, it comes a handful of blank pages – actual blank pages, just to be clear, not the blank-page poems Paterson has a proclivity for – after the notes, isn’t listed in the contents, and got up the noses of a fair few critics with its mid-parentheses, mid-sentence, ostentatious ending. Really, though, nothing can disguise its intrinsic revelatory weight and significance, how ever much the poet seems at pains to undermine any naïve, earnest hunt for intellectual or spiritual meaning: the white page of its printing likened to snow, which in turn becomes a deity’s “shredded evidence”, falling from the skies. Well, for those who haven’t spotted this already, you might want to check the copyright page of Landing Light (2003), Paterson’s equally acclaimed follow-up volume (if one discounts the mag...

Siân Hughes’s The Missing is a short collection of, typically, short poems; a fact that belies this debut’s exactitude, hard-won emotional truths, and long road to completion. It is some thirteen years since Hughes’s vignette “Secret Lives”, appearing here in book form for the first time, first graced London’s tube trains as part of the Poems on the Underground project (and winner of a TLS competition), depicting a familiar suburban world of complex relationships with magical panache; where dressing gowns meet in the middle of the night to “head for a club they know / where the dress code is relaxed midweek, / and the music is strictly soul.” As much of The Missing demonstrates, Hughes has a real talent for capturing such fleeting, subtly significant incidents: a blend of delicate suggestion, invention and colourful wit characterizes her best poems, expressed in unobtrusive, idiomatic language. “The Girl Upstairs”, for example, treads the line between personal happiness and polite s...

V: I’ve been quite disappointed recently at how polarized the poetry world can be. When I’m in London speaking to young poets and people there, they like a range of poets — then I get back to Oxford, and talking to graduate students it can seem sometimes like the only poets taken seriously are Hill, Muldoon, Prynne — these are the serious poets. CR: You can see why. There is a great difference between those poets, but they all have something in common — difficulty. If you’re a graduate student — this is professionalization again — you want to admire something that other people can’t read, where there is work for you. Those three poets represent an employment opportunity. They wouldn’t like Elizabeth Bishop because she is, relatively speaking, quite easy, although she isn’t really that easy — as you know. But there are so many local pleasures, and you persist. ‘Filling Station’ — how can anyone resist it? Well these people can. Because it’s witty, it’s lovely, and they understand it. It...

To those wondering how on earth Autumn has crept up so quickly despite having arrived late – September’s the cruellest; Eliot & Pound had it all wrong, man – I’m right there with you. 2011 looks to have sped on by, and it doesn’t seem a year ago that I was writing about Matter 10 – the decade anniversary issue of the mag published out of Sheffield Hallam University’s renowned MA Writing course – in this meagre corner of the internet. Yet here we are – or I am, at any rate – typing this up hot-on-the-heels (well, almost) of the launch of Matter 11 , a rather funky, hot little pink number, as you’ll see from the above, that wouldn’t look out of place on a coffee table in some swanky hairdressers frequented by gaggles of rich-kid fashionistas. Were it to find itself in that unfortunate situation, however, unlike the tedious fuckwittery that would odds-on make up the glossy pages of its idiotic neighbours, Matter ’s pages are crammed with sharp, witty, gritty, honest, often edifying ...

Sound Archive , by Nerys Williams (Seren, £8.99) "How to sing the texture of hair / drying near fire on a winter's night?" asks the narrator of "Shopkeeper's Song", one of several playfully serious meditations in this curious collection. A former sound librarian, Nerys Williams brings precision, scrutiny and colourful synaesthesia to her terse, contemplative poems: "my favourite perfume was a room of laughter" states the poet in "Aurascope", while words are put under the knife in "An Anatomy of Arguments"; "edges so fine their chords fray into light". Surreal imagery abounds, heightening the poems' examinations of the blurring between reality and illusion, truth and deception: Dublin's "Dead Zoo" of stuffed animals becomes an unlikely metaphor for the forgotten "unreleased singles and demos" that John Peel once championed, now there's "nothing left but teenage kicks...

In her sixth book of poetry, Memorial , Alice Oswald draws on her classical education and longstanding fascination with the oral tradition – tales told rather than written – to produce a mesmeric reworking of the world’s greatest war story: Homer’s Iliad . Yet where most critics have praised, and most translators have sought to capture, what Matthew Arnold called the poem’s “nobility”, Oswald’s version abandons its narrative – the wrath of Achilles – approaching instead what ancient critics called its “enargeia”, or “bright unbearable reality”. The result is a darkly atmospheric poem which flits between biographical laments for the many war-dead and soaring, dramatic similes; “an antiphonal account”, as Oswald states in her introduction, “of man in his world”. Throughout, the unflinching, plain realism of the former – “DIORES son of Amarinceus / Struck by a flying flint / Died in a puddle of his own guts / Slammed down into mud he lies” – is often as gripping as the elemental blaze of...

THE SALT BOOK OF YOUNGER POETS edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough Salt Publishing, October 2011. Paperback, £10.99 The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come. Rachael Allen | Daniel Barrow | Jack Belloli | Jay Bernard | James Brookes | Phil Brown | Niall Campbell | Kayo Chingonyi | Miranda Cichy | John Clegg | Nia Davies | Amy De’ath | Inua Ellams | Charlotte Geater | Tom Gilliver | Dai George | Emily Hasler | Oli Hazzard | Dan Hitchens | ...

The Forward Prizes , now in their twentieth year, are usually the source of much discussion and contention in poetry circles; or at least, the shortlists are. Will the main prize, for best collection of the year, exclusively round up the usual heavyweight suspects, or will it count a couple of unexpected books from lesser-known poets in its ranks? Will it be a commercial press shoo-in, or feature collections put out by hardworking smaller presses? Will the categories of best first collection and best poem introduce 'the next big thing'? Looking at this year's lists, anyone inclined to grumble about the usual main prize shortlist almost always consisting of established, white, predominantly male voices won't be acting unreasonably; in this year's shortlist of Burnside, Harsent, Hill, Longley, Nurkse & O'Brien , we even have one populated entirely by blokes. Sarah Crown raises some interesting points about that here ; doubtless this year's judges (three...

The Swan Just as Blake engraved his poems backwards, out of necessity but also open-mindedness, each illuminated word gleaming in relief against its brightly burning backdrop, something clicked into place as we watched it hurtling upwards: the desperate, beating wingspan testament to what should or could or can be achieved when all’s open, flung wide, neck craned out and eyes on the prize as, thrashing itself from the lake’s surface, its flight was a realised extravagance – as Blake, man of genius and boy of visions, saw angels line the trees, beyond reach of metaphors. poem by Ben Wilkinson; first published in The Sparks (tall-lighthouse, 2008)

Often as it might be said of first collections, Colette Bryce’s The Heel of Bernadette (2000) was a debut of genuine and considerable promise: its taut, economic lines combining everyday vernacular with deftly crafted images and a winning, often unusual musicality, to produce, in its finer moments, poems that were both intellectually provocative and formally agile. It suggested that a more mature and potentially brilliant second collection might follow, but for all its qualities – the poems’ stylish lines, their verve and meticulous execution – its follow-up, The Full Indian Rope Trick (2004), offered little in the way of real surprises, tending to reiterate (with a few notable exceptions) the winsome effects of Bryce’s earlier work. ‘A Spider’, the opening vignette of Self-Portrait in the Dark , quickly and quietly suggests that this new book will be, in at least certain respects, different. A sketch that takes the act of ‘trapp[ing] a spider in a glass’ as symbolic of the narra...

THE SALT BOOK OF YOUNGER POETS edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough Salt Publishing, October 2011. Paperback, £10.99 The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come. Rachael Allen | Daniel Barrow | Jack Belloli | Jay Bernard | James Brookes | Phil Brown | Niall Campbell | Kayo Chingonyi | Miranda Cichy | John Clegg | Nia Davies | Amy De’ath | Inua Ellams | Charlotte Geater | Tom Gilliver | Dai George | Emily Hasler | Oli Hazzard | Dan Hitchen...