I was delighted to discover this blog during a search for R P Hewitt who wrote the school poetry anthology A Choice of Poets. I too have my old school copy from Carolan Grammar School, Belfast, about 1976-7 with my pencil notes in the margins. Like the citation here, Gerard Mankey Hopkins is one of my favourites, especially Binsey Poplars, though Thomas Hardy never appealed. Wilfred Owens’ poems made a lasting impression, not least down to the fact that I had two great grandfathers wounded in the First World War, one of whom I remember well telling me stories of pigeons and ‘muck and bullets’. Lately my poetic tastes have been broadened to include Seamus Heaney, WB Yeats and Louis McNiece, whose work will be the subject of new posts to come. Let me end with an excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
Subliminal Spaces 