Letter from London: The Poet, the Leader, the Bishop, and the Post-Punk Maker

Photograph Source: gnomonic – CC BY 2.0

An early love of poetry kicked in after listening to Bob Dylan and reading Wilfred Owen. But there was always the Penguin Modern Poets series in which three poets were banded together in each of its 27 books. I actually rescued a copy of Penguin Modern Poets 25 with Gavin Ewart, Zulfikar Ghose and B. S. Johnson from a charity shop once, immediately enjoying Gavin Ewart’s line, ‘I drove the hearse back at 70 m.p.h. / My worries flew away.’ A capacity for loss, I thought, reading it.