Earlier this month I went to the celebration of Michael Donaghy’s poetry at the South Bank. I have to admit that I hadn’t read his poems before, although I must have been about the only
person there who wasn’t already a huge fan. I liked his shorter poems the best, perhaps because they were new to me and so the shorter ones were easier to imagine as they were being read. I liked his humour and his refusal to make poems difficult. Safest, a collection of the poems he was working on when he died, is published by Picador.A family friend and poet Janet Harrison died at the end of the year. Janet wrote poems all her life. Her poems often described small details or events such as a conversation or a walk in the countryside in Northamptonshire. When I was a kid Janet was the only adult I knew who wrote poems and it seemed important to know that poems were something worth doing when you grew up too: that they were worth taking seriously. More recently Janet and I wrote to each other and she kindly sent me feedback on poems I was writing and struggled to sort out my use of punctuation. We didn’t always agree on how a poem should be, but that made the conversation more interesting, and I’ll miss her letters in the post. Janet published a collection of her poems called Recognitions.
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