Philip Larkin: Poems selected by Martin Amis

by Philip Larkin

For the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkin's four collections and on his uncollected poems. Chosen by Martin Amis.

'Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh - or, in that curious phrase, "laugh out loud" (as if there's another way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom?... Larkin, often, is more than he is instantly unforgettable.' - Martin Amis

Genres: Poetry, Classics, British Literature, Fiction, Literature, 20th Century, English Literature

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the release of his third collection The Less Deceived in 1955. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows followed in 1964 and 1974. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as "the nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest post-war writer.

Larkin was born in city of Coventry, England, the only son and younger child of Sydney Larkin (1884–1948), city treasurer of Coventry, who came from Lichfield, and his wife, Eva Emily Day (1886–1977), of Epping. From 1930 to 1940 he was educated at King Henry VIII School in Coventry, and in October 1940, in the midst of the Second World War, went up to St John's College, Oxford, to read English language and literature. Having been rejected for military service because of his poor eyesight, Larkin was able, unlike many of his contemporaries, to follow the traditional full-length degree course, taking a first-class degree in 1943. Whilst at Oxford he met Kingsley Amis, who would become a lifelong friend and frequent correspondent. Shortly after graduating he was appointed municipal librarian at Wellington, Shropshire. In 1946, he became assistant librarian at University College, Leicester and in 1955 sub-librarian at Queen's University, Belfast. In March 1955, Larkin was appointed librarian at The University of Hull, a position he retained until his death.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Larkin can be outright heavy and intense but it is so so good!

His approach to themes like death, religion, obligation, and love is quite spot on! These themes have been explored hundreds and hundreds of times by other poets, but he brings something new the table. He speaks to the reader in a rather honest, straightforward way― where there is no place for sugarcoating anything.

I really enjoyed reading this collection, it got boring at some parts, but all in all is a great read.

Here's a sneak peak:

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.


Forget What Did

Stopping the diary
Was a stun to memory,
Was a blank starting,

One no longer cicatrised
By such words, such actions
As bleakened waking.

I wanted them over,
Hurried to burial And looked back on
Like the wars and winters

Missing behind the windows
Of an opaque childhood.
And the empty pages?

Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed come,
And when the birds go.


Love

The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough,
Is having the blind persistence
To upset an existence
Just for your own sake.
What cheek it must take.

And then the unselfish side –
How can you be satisfied,
Putting someone else first So that you come off worst?
My life is for me.
As well ignore gravity.

Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us.
Only the bleeder found
Selfish this wrong way round
Is ever wholly rebuffed,
And he can get stuffed.


This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.


Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of Larkin’s poetry. The brutal but poignant ‘The Mower’ with the demise of a hedgehog and the wise advice of be careful and kind to each other. The Trees and the evocative last line ‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’

His work is poignant, laugh out loud and original.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Larkin misanthropic outlook on life and his religious and views on death can be at times gloomy to read. His skill is how he can change the perspective of a poem. Money, Love, Aubade and the inescapable conclusion of time for all of us.

My favorite and where Larkin is not a misanthrope is The Mower with the death of a hedgehog and the last lines of the poem.

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

[E-Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Philip Larkin gives me the same feelings that I get listening to The Smiths: guilt at how pleasurable it is to wallow in misanthropic gloom, envy of their irreverence, and then the eventual tiring of their fixations. I imagine that Larkin's absence from the ranks of the literary elites stems from this sort of one-trick schtick: every poem seems to go back to the same fear of death / hatred of social conventions / general curmudgeon liness.

But that's why he's so much more fun to read than Eliot or Wallace Stevens or any of those painfully cerebral twentieth-century poets. Someone who describes himself as a "shit in a shuttered chateau" is immediately endearing to me.

My favorite poems out of the collection were:

Wants
The Building
Sad Steps
Vers de Societe

And of course This Be The Verse and Aubade, the two poems I can recite by heart.

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've said it before and i'll say it again: happy, well adjusted people don't make great art.
Scratch the surface of any artist considered great and you'll find a manic depressive, a drug addict, an alcoholic, a sexual deviant of some sort or just generally a neurotic mess.
Nobody could accuse Phillip Larkin of being happy or well adjusted but he did make some great art.
This selection of poems is beautiful, miserable and witty often all within the same poem.
Several of them hit me hard and i had to stop, put the book down and think about them for a bit.
Well worth reading but i wouldn't have wanted to invite Larkin to a dinner party.

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Larkin has finally gone digital: Faber have released his four slim collections and his two slim novels as ebooks (in cyberspace, no-one can see if you’re slim or not), together with a new selection of the poems chosen and introduced by Martin Amis.

I don’t know whether Martin Amis is really the man to select and introduce Larkin, apart from his family connection. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen Kingsley Amis for the job. On the other hand a selection is not too hard to make, given Larkin’s small output, and Amis doesn’t go astray here. As for his introduction, it is full of interesting things, if ultimately a bit of a mess: it reminds one that Amis is really a much better essayist than he is a novelist. He defines Larkin not as a ‘poet’s poet’ (which he isn’t), nor even primarily as a ‘people’s poet’ (which he is), but as a ‘novelist’s poet’, beloved by novelists for his ability to achieve in a few verses what takes them whole books.

As to the poems themselves, what more is there to say? The greatness of Larkin’s poetry is deeply rooted in his failings as a human being. Not that the poems reflect his failings directly (which is why the publication of his letters was a shock). The poems show him at his best. But the underlying sense of incompleteness is what makes them great, and why we respond to them. They are real.

[AC]

A nice selection of Larkin's poetry, including "Aubade". There is an interesting introduction by Martin Amis, that includes some personal reminiscences and some hilarious commentary on Monica Jones.

(I read too little poetry to try to rate this)

[Jed Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry, innit? ❤️

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

“And these are the first signs:/ Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power/Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:/Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines-/How can they ignore it?”

Martin Amis does a decent enough introduction. He touches on some of the memories he personally had in meeting Larkin when he would visit the family home. To those who may not know, he was a friend of his father, Kingsley. He touches upon the retrospective views on the poet and how the likes of Tom Paulin spoke out about his apparent racism and misanthropy etc, which emerged from his personal writings after his death.

Like countless others I’ve always had a soft spot for “This Be The Verse” since I first read it back in the day. Its punchy simplicity and directness were and still remain a refreshing tonic in a discipline that too often can disappear up its own rectum. The haunting memento mori of “Ambulances” also holds up well as do the likes of “High Windows” and “The Old Fools”.

So overall these are entertainingly cynical and he is a curmudgeon old bugger even in his younger years, but it is that distinctive flavour which makes so many of these poems so memorable and enjoyable.

[Irina Bordogna · Rating 3 out of 5]

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.
[da "For Sidney Bechet"]

Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
[da "An Arubdel Tomb"]

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
["The trees"]

The wine heats temper and complexion: Oath-enforced assertions fly
On rheumy fevers, resurrection,
Regicide and rabbit pie.
[da "Livings. III"]

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives – Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, "That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds." And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
["High Windows"]

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
[da "Annus Mirabilis"]

Only the young can be alone freely.
The time is shorter now for company,
And sitting by a lamp more often brings
Not peace, but other things.
[da "Vers de Société"]

[Noah Goats · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larkin wasn't very prolific, so you might as well just read his complete works. It's not a very thick book and I open my copy often. I only bought this collection because I wanted some Larkin on my Kindle so I can read him anytime, anywhere. (Formatting can be an issue with ebooks, but they've done a good job with the Kindle version of this collection.)

In his introduction Martin Amis makes the case, briefly, for Larkin's importance and I agree with Amis 100%. It may be that he was a seriously flawed human being, but his poetry is memorable, powerful, original, and sometimes very funny.

Amis has gathered all the hits in this slim volume, there isn't a loser in the bunch. If you want an introduction to Larkin, these be the verses.

[Raquel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ousado. Brilhante. Nostálgico. Poemas feitos com a luz do entardecer.

"... Achamos que irão fundear e deixar a carga
De tudo o quanto é bom em nossa vida, em paga
De toda a espera tão paciente ano após ano —
É aí que está o nosso engano:

Um único navio está a caminho, só que
Estranho, as velas negras, trazendo a reboque
Um silêncio vasto e sem aves. Em suas águas,
Não brotam nem rebentam vagas."

.

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

just lovely

[Aabha Sharma · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel bad giving this just a “good” rating but I am Indian, so many of the references went a bit over my head. I do love some of them but I don’t understand the others. Still I would enjoy this if some explained them to me.

[Lina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels like a crossover between Yeats and Bukowski.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across Philip Larkin in 1973 in of all places the Cleveland Public School System. I was lucky enough to have Ms Pesek as my teacher. She was rather cutting-edge in a system that was mediocre at best. It was in her class I read so many above my grade level books she provided, some probably not appropriate for the typical fourth grader. Not bad books but very good books like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One day she read us a poem about a man visiting a church who removed his cycling clips before entering the building. It was odd because the church was no longer in regular use. The man considers the visit a waste of time. That was pretty powerful stuff for a young Catholic. For some reason about a year ago, that memory came back to me. I searched the internet using the keywords from my memory and found the poem "Church Going" by Philip Larkin.

I looked for a collection at my library and went away empty handed. I ended up buying this collection selected by Martin Amis who also writes the introduction. I haven't read all of Larkin's poems, so I can't really comment on the selection, but I have read Amis and liked his writing. Amis knew Larkin and that adds a personal experience rather than just a stock biography. Larkin was friends with Kingsley Amis, Martin's father.

Larkin seems to look and sounds much like a person happy to live in a dystopia. Anything more lively would seem to crack his shell. Even when reading his poems, he has that dry, humorless, voice that captures his words so well. This is by no means saying his writing is bad but different. From my interpretation, he is to poetry what cyberpunk is to science fiction. The darker, more desperate side of poetry. Where there is joy, it is quickly countered.

In "Trees" a budding leaf, to most a sign of spring, is a green kind of grief. The leaves are born knowing they will never grow old. It's a yearly trick of the tree to look new. In "High Windows," an old man looks down on the youth in the street and imagines their paradise in a time of "the pill" and the diaphragm and the long downward slide they are heading on. Then he wonders if years ago people said the same of him when he turned his back on religion.

Larkin is also critical of money. He refers to salaried employees as "toads." "Homage to a Government," tells of bringing all the soldiers back home from there far off outposts and leaving the places they guarded for the lack of money. They are in far off places. Who really cares about them? Nothing will change at home. The statues will remain standing and the children will not know the difference. However, "All we can hope to leave them now is money. The poem "Money" closes with:

I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Larkin has the unique ability to use rhyme and meter in his work and still have it sound conversational. His writing is familiar too. He writes as a person who prefers to be isolated and alone he relates to those of us who tend to be a bit introverted and maybe a bit cynical too. This may not be the typical English pastoral poetry one reads in high school or in English Literature classes, but it is important, nonetheless. For those interested in reading Larkin, spend some time listening to him read his poems. I have found several online and listening to him read his own words gives a deeper feel to the poems and allows the reader to follow the pattern of his writing.

[ZaRi]

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river’s level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl—and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a Christmas gift years ago from Richard. He chose this because of the Hull connection. And I think it was the Christmas after Hull had been announced as the City of Culture for 2017. This year appears to be the year in which I can engage with poetry. I find it a difficult thing to read. But I realised, with help from, I believe, Kate Tempest, that it's a medium to be read out loud, to hear, to feel, and that's what was missing. I'd been approaching poetry in a two dimensional way. I bought a couple of recordings of Philip Larkin reading his poetry, and found that reading whilst listening, has helped me to hear and feel.

[Catherine Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

astonishing. knew i would enjoy, but frequently giddy at just how much so. that kind of awe & joy while reading you later think you've falsified & romanticised. woke up at 05:30 on friday to read more before work - it's silly how good. the intro alone was some of the most fun i've had reading all year, the poems full force slaps.

if you thought i was relentless in pushing A Place of Greater Safety all summer, get bloody ready. this bad boy is a tenth the pages; you have no excuse, and i will fight long.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are few poets talked about in Britain as much as Larkin, but there were some good poems and a lot of forgettable ones, and his first collection was dire. I'm not sure what all the fuss is about.

[Fergus Menner]

Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.

[Alex Sarll]

Obviously I already knew bits of Larkin, because who in Britain doesn't, but in recent years I'd happened across a little more, or else realised phrases I'd thought older or simply part of the firmament were him, and increasingly it dawned on me that he was a serious man in serious verse (sorry). Possibly, too, it helps to be on the downward slide in approaching a poet seemingly born into disappointed middle age. The introduction by Martin Amis, who of course has himself now reached the end of Cemetery Road, makes the frankly baffling claim that "Larkin is never 'depressing'. Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown" (I'd be fascinated to see the screening of Schindler's List he attended). But even he has to concede that thinking about Larkin's life is frustrating, that the man appears almost deliberately to have turned his back on chances and connections to fuel the grand spleen and alienation of the work. But despite that alienation, that insistence always of being at a remove from life, the poetry at least did connect. Over and over, reading this, I was confirmed in my sense of Larkin as the last British poet - lyricists excluded - to be both good and famous, the last to ride both horses at once and say big things in something approaching demotic style and come across as a sage instead of a trendy vicar, neither off on the cultural margins (despite his own best efforts) nor sounding pre-packaged for a secular society's last few occasions of church going. Not always, granted - there are flashes of other styles, as when the second section of Livings stumbles close to a sort of fractured modernism. Does it reasonably well, come to that - but those short, choppy lines aren't the Larkin that anyone remembers, and no wonder when he was so awfully good at sounding like a more eloquent incarnation of the voice in your own head with all those seductive reasons why you probably shouldn't bother.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

From “Aubade”

The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

I’m trying to develop a greater appreciation of poetry and Philip Larkin seemed like a good choice. His writing is powerful. Larkin's 1971 poem "This Be the Verse" particularly struck a chord for me.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Title: Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis
Author: Philip Larkin (author), Martin Amis (introduction, compilation)
Year 2011
Genre: Poetry
Page count: 155 pages
Date(s) read: 1/8/23 - 1/9/23
Reading journal entry #13 in 2023

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read Larkin over many years, so most of these poems are familiar territory. I was more curious about which ones Martin Amis would select and what he had to say in his introduction. The introduction was quite illuminating, though rather frenetic. He wrote not only as the editor of this collection, but someone who grew up with Larkin as what could be described as the "weird uncle." He covers the why's for the poems selected, along with his personal experiences with Larkin. I would say Amis did a good job with his selections. Yet still, Larkin was not a prolific poet, so my advice is to stick to his Collected Poems in order to read them all.

[Patricia]

I’m currently reading a lot of poetry...mostly Irish. I’m making my way through Patrick Kavanagh just now and remembered that I hadn’t added this book to my Goodreads account so a little bit out of step here. But then are you ever finished with a poetry collection?

The Mower is a favourite poem of mine and together with The Whitsun Weddings drew me to this poet. Initially I thought ‘oh very English’ but then I read Vers de Société and think Oh my God that’s me...’.

This is a collection that I will be returning to regularly.

[Olivia Waern Copley · Rating 5 out of 5]

They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats

Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

[Dave H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth a read. Some very nice poems, somewhat easy and snide or cynical, maybe easy because they are snide or cynical but they hold up and it isn't easy to be easy on the first read and hold up for more. I quite like "High Windows" and of course, "This Be the Verse."

[Jonathan Natusch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witty, profound, sometimes bloody depressing. Many of these poems make you immediately re-read them, marvelling in the language or admiring the clever structure.

I hadn't read Larkin since my high school days, but got lent this volume by a friend. Will have to now hunt down a copy of my own!

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this collection because I loved the poem Aubade and had only read one other, the famous This Be The Verse. I didn't like most of the other collected poems nearly as much, but there are some great moments here and there.

[Andrew Corsini · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you see these poems in chronological order, it's clear Larkin didn't start with his great, distinctive style. Amis, however, finds a way to make it look Larkin was always that bitter, nasty and very, very funny.