This is a guest post by Ian McMillan
Let’s face it, most poets are neglected (or they think they are) and, oddly, even when poets published by small independent presses are out of print, they’re still somehow in print because the publisher has got loads of copies of unsold books under the bed and in the wardrobe in the spare room.
Here, though, are five poets who seem to be out of print; two of them are so out of print that I almost lost their books. I found them under the bed, of course.
- • Pete Morgan: The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed, Secker and Warburg (!973)
- In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Secker and Warburg had a fantastic poetry list, including poets like James Fenton, Jon Hollander and writers known in other fields like Erica Jong. For me, Pete Morgan was one of the best; his poetry is lyrical, beautifully constructed and written for performance. Pete was one of the poets I took as a model for the freelance life when I was a young poet starting to make my way in the literary world: he did workshops and gigs and school visits and wrote copy for advertising firms; anything to keep the wolf from the door. The Grey Mare Being the Better Steed was his first collection and it brims with work that begs to be performed, like ‘My Enemies Have Sweet Voices,’ which Al Stewart later turned into a song. His other Secker books A Winter Visitor and The Spring Collection are well worth hunting out.
- • Philip Callow: Cave Light, Rivelin Press (1981)
- Philip Callow was a marvellous novelist as well as a poet; his novels like The Hosanna Man and The Story of my Desire are well worth reading. The wonderful Bradford-based Rivelin Press, run by another neglected poet, David Tipton, published a number of Callow’s collections, including this one, full of beautifully observed poems of love and the natural world: ‘After you hear the rustle in a denim shirt/of a pocketful of apple leaves/Gathered by your pocket under eyes of apples.’
- • Harold Massingham: Frost Gods, Macmillan (1971)
- Massingham always suffered from being a couple of years below Ted Hughes at Mexborough Grammar School, so his work seems to be endlessly in Hughes’s long shadow. I’ve always enjoyed Massingham’s imagistic, Anglo-Saxon influenced, word-drunk work. In later life he made a living as a crossword complier under the name Mass, and that makes sense to me because his poems can often feel like crossword clues, as in the poem ‘Cow’: ‘Tub-sided galleon-/But O, her walk, stalwart, a wonder of hundredweights/Borne by sure bone.’ Marvellous!
- • Anne Cluysenaar: Double Helix, Carcanet Press (1982)
- Anne Cluysenaar was born in Belgium in 1936 and I knew her when I was writer-in-residence at Sheffield Poly in the mid-1980’s; she taught English and Creative Writing and had an evangelical zeal for the power of poetry to change lives. Double Helix was published by Carcanet Press in 1982; it’s a remarkable example of hybrid writing, being a combination of Cluysenaar’s poem and her mother’s prose memoirs and letters; the writing bridges the generations and invites us to examine our own pasts. Tragically, Anne was killed by her son in 2014.
- • Agneta Falk: Here by Choice, Trigram Press (1980)
- Agneta Falk is a Swedish poet who was born in 1946. She lived in the endlessly creative enclave of Hebden Bridge for many years until she moved in the late 1990’s to the equally creative enclave of San Francisco, where she’s still very active on the literary scene. Here By Choice is her first pamphlet and I’ve always enjoyed her striking and unsettling lines like ‘A car goes by/rocking the floor boards/the wood creaks/like petals of red roses/hitting the tarmac.’ Or, from her poem ‘Hanna’: ‘She knew nothing of fear or hope/laying her bare bones in the/arms of soft lichen.’
Ian McMillan is a poet and host of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. His most recent book is Yes But What Is This Exactly?, published by the Poetry Business in 2020.