Painting, Poetry, Politics

As in the previous collection, Paris has a place in this one, with re-views/essays about various artists, writers, expatriates, editors, and others who were in the city at one time or another. I have to admit that I’m generally looking back in these pieces to the Paris of the 1890s or the 1920s, “golden periods”, as they’re called, though in a review of poets in translation I do briefly comment on a collection of more-contemporary French left-wing poets. I doubt that they will be familiar to most British poetry readers, and that seems to me a good reason for reviewing them in the first place, and reprinting the re-view in this book. In case I’m accused of overlooking interesting British poets, there are reviews of several of them. These are from a list of several hundred books of poetry that I reviewed during a fifty years stint as a reviewer for the magazine, Ambit, edited by Martin Bax.One of the pleasures of writing for Ambit was that I wasn’t asked to only deal with books from established poets.