Peter Reading: truculent, challenging poet.

Christopher Logue: who remined us that the Iliad was alive.

Gilbert Adair: Freewheeling polymath, and the only man who could have translated La Disparition so brilliantly.

And now Christopher Hitchens, who loved a fight, and chose God as the biggest and baddest opponent available. I saw him in the flesh only once, at a conference about Kipling, who was one of his heroes. (Hitchens was good at choosing heroes). He gave a talk on Kipling and America that was good, but what I remember most happily was the delay. Some distinguished guests had not turned up, and we had to wait a few minutes before they arrived. Hitchens happily filled the time. “Let’s have some limericks!” he siad, and recited some corkers, especially Robert Conquest’s version of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man:

Seven ages. First puking and muling,

Then very pissed off with your schooling,

Then fucks and then fights,

Then judging chaps’ rights.

Then sitting in slippers. Then drooling.

Terrific.

Update 18th December: And now Vaclav Havel…

The main feature, of course, is Duncan Gillies MacLaurin’s collection of sonnets, but sixteen other poets are represented as well.

Enjoy!

All of Duncan’s poems follow the traditional sonnet rhyming patterns, but in some of the poems (and they are among the ones I like best) he has moved away from the iambic pentameter used by most sonneteers in English, to see how the form works with four beat lines, or seven beats.

And why not? Shakespeare included a tetrameter sonnet in his collection. Here is one of Duncan’s:
Mama’s Little Boy

A tearaway with golden curls,
he’ll always be a darling boy,
your little pet, your pride and joy,
the odd one out among the girls.

You worshipped that precocious child
who trusted you and shied from crowds,
the silver lining in the clouds,
a highland burn, remote and wild.

You’d cut him out to be a star,
a maestro on the violin,
a new Yehudi Menuhin.

You never dreamed he’d play guitar;
and now see nothing to commend
this bully charging round the bend.