The Arvon Foundation's 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts's 'Praise Poem for North Uist', and Keith Bosley's 'Corolla'; Aidan Carl Mathews's 'Severances', and John Levett's 'The Photographs of Paris'. The first two are longish, the others shorter. The only one that won a prize - and that the smallest, £100 - is 'Corolla', a sequence of nine exactly rhymed and metred sonnets, culminating in a stunning version of the Ronsard sonnet that defeated Yeats:

LRB 1 July 1982 | PDF Download