Beautiful feelings of sensitive people is just a five-word way of explaining to someone who never reads poetry what we are hoping to find in a book of poems. It is the most unifying (and featureless?) description I could find. It is not there to exclude political poetry – to have beautiful feelings and not wish for a beautiful world would be like lying on a beach for eight hours and not noticing that there is an ocean just in front of you. In fact, wanting to be Greta Thunberg is a beautiful feeling in itself. It describes a wide range of 21st century poetry but perhaps not the majority. The figures suggest that there is a public verdict on the poetry of the past, so of the period say 1970 to 2000, which is utterly favourable – people have an image of Being a Poet and they want to go and inhabit that image. It is a Yes vote. Maybe all those struggles were not in vain. But, that wish to be a poet does not necessarily mean you have much interest in the work of other poets.


Book Information
ISBN 9781848619418
Author Andrew Duncan
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Shearsman Books
Publisher Shearsman Books
Weight(grams) 501g