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FROM THE SONNET HISTORY OF MODERN POETRY
Poems by John Whitworth
Illustrated by Gerald Mangan
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John Whitworth’s and Gerald Mangan’s subjects in this highly original volume include G.K. Chesterton, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson, William McGonagall, the 1st World War poets, Eliot, Yeats, Graves, Ezra Pound, Auden and MacNiece, Hugh McDairmid, Dylan Thomas, Larkin and Betjeman, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, Gavin Ewart, Seamus Heaney, Tom Leonard, Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay, Tony Harrison, Sylvia Plath, Ginsberg, Stevie Smith, Kit Wright and Douglas Dunn, Paul Muldoon, James Fenton, Peter Reading, Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell.
No reader of 20th century poetry will want to be without this volume.
“Mangan’s fine line drawings have won many admirers and have nicely counterpointed Whitworth’s witty and acerbic verses … At their best (the sonnets) have vigour and a touch of enchantment.”
Paul Groves, Poetry Review
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The Long and the Short of It
We poets are a proud race. Day and night
When and wherever alcohol may be
Consumed without financial penalty
We meet to praise the craft. Here’s tall Kit Wright
Beaming above the passion and the fight
With disconnected geniality.
His English charm is like his poetry;
Simple straightforwardness that isn’t quite.
Next to him Douglas Dunn is bearded, terse,
With serious glasses hooding serious eyes.
He writes a Scottish, clotted kind of verse.
And he is very short contrariwise.
I dedicate this picture to the Muse
Who chooses poets. Poets do not choose.
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FROM THE SONNET HISTORY OF MODERN POETRY
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: John Whitworth by Gerald Mangan
Publication: 1999 (64 pages laminated paperback)
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