Selected Poems

by Blake Morrison

This selection brings together new and previously unpublished poems by Blake Morrison.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published July 28, 1999

About the author

Blake Morrison was educated at Nottingham University, McMaster University and University College, London. After working for the Times Literary Supplement, he went on to become literary editor of both The Observer and the Independent on Sunday before becoming a full-time writer in 1995.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and former Chair of the Poetry Book Society and Vice-Chair of PEN, Blake has written fiction, poetry, journalism, literary criticism and libretti, as well as adapting plays for the stage. His best-known works are probably his two memoirs, "And When Did You Last See Your Father?" and "Things My Mother Never Told Me."

Since 2003, Blake has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. He lives in south London, with his wife and three children.

Reviews

[Callum Morris-Horne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5.

A mixed bag that holds some unforgettable poems. Morrison’s collection covers a lot of ground, both thematically and formally: from odes to provincial life in the counties to elegies of environmental catastrophe; madrigals about misunderstandings in love and marriage to childhood, parenthood and gender. Though the sociopolitical poems worked less well for me, the rural landscapes written about are rendered lyrical and ravishing under Morrison’s pen. Standouts include the wonderfully Gothic, folkloric ‘Whinny Moor’ and one of the best long poems I’ve ever read: ‘The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper’ which, written in dialect, is not only a shocking portrayal of the titular serial killer and his crimes, but as relevant now as it was when it was published in 1985 in its brooding meditation upon misogyny and toxic masculinity.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blake Morrison is perhaps better known as a novelist and memoirist, but he made his name as a poet in the 1980s. This Selected Poems was published early in his career and draws on his first two collections. There's an impressive range to Morrison's output as this volume ably demonstrates. The centrepiece, and the most striking poem in the book and the one for which Blake Morrison is best known, The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, is a visceral dialect folk ballad that can leave no reader unaffected.

[Colin Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

I met a poet in college who took great pride in people having to work to understand his poetry. He readily acknowledged that novelists and short story writers didn’t get to pull this trick, and that this procurement of meaning was one of his favorite parts of poetry. Me, I just thought it was a garbage scheme, and still to this day, the poets I enjoy the most keep this trend to a minimum. At their best, good poets make their poems work on both levels—first for the reader who simply wants to garner a surface level enjoyment, and then for the reader who wants to mine for meaning.

Blake Morrison’s Selected Poems starts out strong, hitting this vein of poems I love, but by the end just has too many that mean nothing without further explanation. Divided into five parts, Morrison covers a variety of topics, adding various issues, styles and techniques as the book progresses. Part one has the most straightforward poems and maybe that’s why it appealed to me the most. The second part introduces poems written in a U.K. dialect. (Many writers can’t pull this off, but Morrison makes it work even inside of the poetic structure.) Part three introduces the first—and strongest—of three long poems, “The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper,” a rhyming dialect poem about the British serial killer. Usually I’m not a fan of rhyming poetry, but Morrison delivers the crass, violent details well in this structure (An why, if e weren’t no sadist, / ad e left girls, more ‘n once / wi a hundred stabs in t’breastbone / an planks shoved up their cunts?). Part four introduces a series of well-crafted love poems, but the final part really starts showing Morrison's growing trend of needing words not found on the page.

Though the second long poem, “Madrigalia,” succeeds in being a two-sided love story, the third and longest poem, “The Inquisitor,” a second-person tale about British secrecy that really should be interesting, ends up being one of those poems where the author didn’t put in enough to enjoy it. For a poem that makes up nearly 25% of the collection in terms of page count, that’s unforgivable. It doesn’t help that it’s the second-to-last poem, essentially spoiling the collection.

I’m not sure where I initially started coming off the recommendation track with Selected Poems. The first part is so good and contains a top-five poem for me—“On Sizewall Beach”—about an east Anglican coastal village with a beach, a nuclear power station and an incident where a driver goes around a blind curve not knowing there’s a kid on the side of the road. Other standout poems include “Metamorphoses of Childhood” (about a boy growing up through the death of relatives), “Sleep On It” (about being fed up with your kids, but realizing you’ll get over it with a good night’s rest), “Kindertotenlieder” (a poem of loss based on other composers and poets) and the aforementioned “The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper.” These poems impressed me with the complex feelings they introduced in such sparse language—giving me a surface level enjoyment that made me want to dig deeper—and then annoyed me with how many of the other poems went the great unrelatable route. It’s a pity, but at least it’s one that didn’t take too much of my time. Two stars, but reaching higher.