INHABITING A MOMENT

In Actions and Travels you include about 100 of the “poems I love and what it is I love about them” along with a broad range of poets from around the world, younger local ones such as Hera Lindsay Bird and Tayi Tibble, and plenty of dead ones such as Donne, Keats, Bishop and Blake. The book has theory, ample examples and even exercises, but less direct teaching of techniques – who is it aimed at?

It is more a book about reading poetry than writing poetry – the writing suggestions come as an appendix at the end, although they draw on the poems and poetic strategies I talk about in each chapter. But the best way to learn how to write poetry is to read poetry, so anyone interested in writing poetry should get something from the book. But I wrote it mostly as a kind of conversation with other readers of poetry, who might be interested in comparing their own readings of poems with mine. I had in mind two kinds of conversations I have had quite often in real life. First, I quite often talk or Keats’s , you might find yourself equally taken with the queasy gorgeousness of the poetry of Rebecca Hawkes. And, on the other hand, if you relish the ingenious and outrageous arguments of Luke Kennard’s wolf psychiatrist in poems such as  and , or love following the convoluted metaphysics of Patricia Lockwood’s extended metaphors, it would be a pity to miss out on John Donne’s equally ingenious arguments in poems like . My book isn’t a scholarly work, it is a conversational, improvisatory collection of observations and responses, drawing on enough of a range of poems that most readers should find at least one or two discoveries in it – of poets they didn’t know and find they love – as well as some favourites they might like to re-encounter in a new setting.