MY BOOKS
Keats's Anchovy (2021)
The Poems
​
This collection of selected and unpublished poems brings together the titular ‘Keats’s Anchovy’ and four sequences written over the years. What other book is likely to see John Keats, Deborah Harry, Samuel Beckett and Pablo Picasso, among others, between the same covers?
The sonnets in ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ are the earliest poems. They tread a well-worn path of romantic love from first flush to bum’s rush. If the route is more than familiar it’s hoped the reader will gain a fresh angle on the staging-points.
The poems called ‘Chrysleriana’ were written on work trips to New York City at the height of the AIDS epidemic, as a tribute to the courage of people living with HIV/AIDS. Watch this short YouTube reading and intro to one of the poems, ‘City of Dead Umbrellas’.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
‘Homage to Isabel Rawsthorne’ is a suite of 11 poems inspired by the work of this remarkable twentieth-century artist. In this YouTube clip I read and discuss one of the poems called ‘Lizard, 1946’.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
‘Horse Head of the Moon Goddess’ contains other recent poems, some light, some serious, about art, poetry, politics and families. Watch this YouTube clip for a reading of the short poem ‘Horse Head …’ that gives this section its name.
​
​
​
​
​
Why Keats’s Anchovy?
I could offer many reasons for my fondness for the anchovy: its elegant shape, its sheen, its curiosity that takes it foraging into most waters of the planet. But its poignant, love-hate relationship with the dying Keats is the clincher. Keats described himself as a chameleon poet; perhaps in his final days in Rome, when this venturesome fish unexpectedly found its way to his table, as the only form of daily sustenance allowed by the medics, he was also part-anchovy.
​
Of Purest Blue (2020)
A translation with Claudio Tedesco of poetry by Francisco Brines (1932-2021), with the original Spanish. In 2020 Brines was awarded the Cervantes Prize for Literature, widely regarded as equivalent to the Nobel, for a 'poetic work that goes from the carnal and the purely human to the metaphysical, to the spiritual, towards an aspiration of beauty and immortality'. Translation was conducted with the poet and supported by the Ministry of Culture in Spain. The book contains a memoir of Brines by the English novelist Rufus Gunn. Artwork is by the painter the late Alain Roselló.
F. R. Leavis: The Creative University (2016)
An introduction to the educational thought of F. R. Leavis (1895–1978), probably the most controversial and arguably the greatest English literary critic of the twentieth century. It provides the first in-depth examination of Leavis’s ideas in relation to contemporary mass higher education. Based on original research, the book gives an overview of the critic’s life, work and influence. What was Leavis like as a teacher? Was he really so ferocious? The book ends with my account of being taught by Leavis as an undergraduate.