Towards the end of Gavin Ewart's delightful and comfortable volume there is a poem called 'It's hard to dislike Ewart'. Too true, as Clive James or Peter Porter might say, possibly with a certain wry exasperation. Generally speaking, our fondness and admiration for poets does go with a potential of patronage or dislike, a pleasure in our sense of the absurdities and vulnerabilities of their worlds - Keats blushing to the ears as he writes raptly about womens' waists; Eliot going on about his delicate apprehension of time and God, not hoping to turn again, and so forth. Their greatness is intimate with a wholly personal existence, as touching and exposed as romance. Needless to say, Ewart is not like that.

LRB 4 September 1980 | PDF Download