Farewell, Anglia Auto Trader

Where now for poetry criticism

My first regular gig as a poetry critic came in 2002 when the Guardian launched the Review: a spacious Saturday supplement, dedicated to books. I had published reviews here and there, but now I was offered a full page on a new poetry book every month.

My only other media work at the time was the night shift at Anglia Auto Trader: putting photos of second-hand cars into paid-for boxes as the stars shone over Norwich. The fee for a Guardian article paid my rent for the month. My first, on Peter Reading’s Faunal, was decorated in the print edition with a cartoon of the poet, pinkly dyspeptic.

What I’m trying to say is: this was Luxury Poetry Criticism.

Editors change, and eventually I wrote for other places, including the Sunday Times, where I was poetry critic from 2013 until this summer. When I began, there was the prospect of a review of a new poetry book every month. When I left, I’d only managed to average 2.5 pieces a year since January 2020, trimming big names (Claudia Rankine, Frederick Seidel, Louise Glück) into bonsai copy.

The Guardian’s book pages have also been dwindling — and last month the pocket-sized Review finally folded. There was no sign of poetry in the final issue, unless you count former Labour minister Alan Johnson plugging his foreword to a reprint of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings (‘I’m desperate to show off about it’).

Print is shrinking to its margins. The empire of local Auto Trader magazines is now ‘the UK and Ireland’s largest digital automotive marketplace’. And poetry is always first out the door when space is scarce. Look on my word counts, ye mighty, and despair.

So here’s Some Flowers Soon. I’m going to keep it short (imagine an imaginary page) and weekly: a newsletter of poetry I’ve read and — mostly — enjoyed. There may be a Puzzle Corner, and possibly Tidbits from poetry magazines. After a while, I hope to add some new essays and some old articles from behind the paywalls.

It will take a more personal approach than the newspaper Noel-Tods who did their close-reading between the Crime Fiction round-up and the literature-adjacent advert (‘Why Not Be a Proofreader?’) But I’ll be keeping the comments turned off. I always felt lucky to have left the Guardian before the dark days of Below the Line, and I’m out there on Twitter if you want to tell me what you *really* think.

Here’s something I enjoyed reading this week: Vidyan Ravinthiran’s contribution to the New Defences of Poetry project, which praises the potential ‘political force’ of

a thought-process that, melodically alive within a poem, is unpredictable, and must remain so, in its, in Édouard Glissant’s phrase, ‘meanders of relation’; and is finally inseparable from the verse-textures it both produces and is produced by.

I’m interested in thinking about poetry in the world, and what poetry might give us as social and political creatures (‘some flowers soon?’) But I’m also interested in thinking about what poems are, in themselves.

As my favourite piece of writing about poetry — and the reason I almost called this place Bully for Them — puts it: ‘The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out’.