Scottish Poetry Library
For the most recent issue of our newsletter, the Poetry Reader, we asked the poet and novelist to tell us what he’s been reading of late…
When do you get to read?
When I’m not writing. Since I left the university 28 years ago I have been a full-time writer. But I still feel I don’t read enough, and try continually to discipline myself to “keep up” with the schedule I propose to myself and don’t meet. I was always quite a slow reader. I mentioned that to an audience once and someone said, ‘For a slow reader, I think you’ve done quite well.’
What was the last poem you pressed on a friend, with a manic gleam in your eye?
It was Hopkins’s ‘Spring and Fall’ (‘Margaret, are you grieving / Over goldengrove unleaving?’) to my daughter, whose name is Margaret, while we were cooking something together during a recent visit (hers) from London, where she now lives and works. She was not grieving at all. I just wanted to impress on her that her name, which she complains about, can be very beautiful.
If poems were food, name one fancy Heston Blumenthal-style starter, one hearty breakfast favourite and one guilty after-pub snack.
I think because of Heston Blumenthal’s intellectual / scientific approach to cooking, it wouldn’t be too much to kick off with Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, a truly great poem, the poetic equivalent of a starter at The Fat Duck. The hearty (in fact it would have to be an all-day) breakfast could be something like Wordsworth’s Prelude, or Browning’s The Ring and the Book. The guilty after-pub snack might be any gnomic little eight-liner by Emily Dickenson.
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