For some people modernism ends with The Waste Land and a handful of extracts from the Cantos, after which poetry returns to its proper course via the Movement, Hughes, Heaney, the New Generation and onwards to today’s dominant voices.

The counter-position is that modernism never went away, and that (often at a distance from literary London) it produced some of the most powerful work of the past century: MacDiarmid in Scotland, Bunting in Northumbria, Hill & Prynne in their different orbits around Cambridge. Continue reading →

I’m delighted that Modern Poetry in Translation have chosen my versions of three descents to the classical underworld as their featured poem of the month. You can read the poems here (and I’d also recommend exploring the wealth of other poems available on the MPT website). Continue reading →