You won’t recall them now – ‘The Burial Mound’,

‘Valhalla’, ‘The Dead Warrior’ – poems which sound

Too much like half-cooked, over-seasoned stews

Of tough ingredients culled from Gunn and Hughes

(‘Thistles’, ‘The Byrnies’, ‘The Warriors of the North’,

‘The Wound’). Hard man, you read my pourings-forth,

Gauche as they were, with such strict tolerance,

Such courtesy, you never looked askance

At what, derived from you, partook of truth

Though twisted through the fantasies of youth;

You taught me form, reminding me of sense

When rhetoric or modish violence

Deformed a phrase or rhythm; you deferred

To nothing but economy of word.

But that was not the start of it. I had

At seventeen – such a discerning lad! –

Looked for your poems in the library

And found The Sense of Movement by Gunn, T.

I read it with mixed feelings, much impressed

By rigour – by the epithets that dressed

Your heroes for attack, more than by what

I now admire as rigour in the thought –

Yet doubting if such toughness was OK

For arty liberals of that latter day.

Then My Sad Captains showed me how the wise

Must reason toughly, since they recognise

Unreason in the will, desire and sleep,

And know the limits of the calm they keep.

Soon afterwards we met. I was nineteen

And still a stranger to the poetry scene.

You were in London in the happy year

Of ‘Talbot Road’, and over pints of beer

Two or three nights we talked of poetry –

Image and metre, gossip and history.

I boasted somewhat, mainly listening though.