Ian on Sunday

Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian poet who died at the sadly young age of 56, on receiving his Nobel Prize in the Grand Hall of the Swe-dish Academy in Stockholm in December, 1987, declared a great truth: “There is no doubt in my mind that, should we have been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programmes, there would be much less grief on earth.”

I do not get the impression that the governance of the world is good or that it is getting better.

It isn’t an exercise that makes much sense to try and rank poets in a sort of hierarchy of greatness.

I long ago became convinced about two major things. They simplified the days that pass so quickly.

I have in mind compiling a book of brief pen portraits of Extraordinary People I have been fortunate to know in my long life – at least, a selected number of them since , to tell the truth, if you know anyone well enough and long enough everyone is remarkable!

I love poetry. It is the quiet passion of my life.

I do not think I am the only one to get the feeling that the world is heating up in more ways than one and spinning out of control.

I have always tended to think – against a great deal of evidence I must admit – that many other things are fundamentally more important than politics. 

If you can, every now and then it is good to escape the reality which you have settled into.

At high tide, when the wind is strong, from my veranda in Bel Air Gardens I could swear the sea seems taller.

I wrote an essay thirty-two years ago which at ninety still has not lost its meaning.

A day is dulled and dimmed if it passes and I do not pick up a book of poems in my library, browse in some anthology, find a new poem in some magazine or at least before my eyes shut glance at some old favourite lines from Hopkins, Walcott, Yeats, Carter or a score of other supreme masters of the art and craft of making poems.

It is astonishing to think that Derek Walcott first published poems in the 1940s.

Our lives of such infinite value come and go in a whirl of busyness. 

We cannot afford to cramp or antagonise or even bore our intellectuals and our artists, our wits and our craftsmen, our dreamers and our thinking men and women.

The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins – glancing and incandescent – is some of the most extraordinary to be found in English.

To put it mildly, West Indies Cricket – especially Test Cricket – has fallen on parlous times.

I tell the story of Tony Judt. Tony Judt was a writer on recent world history whom I greatly admired. 

I have always loved sport. All my boyhood and youth I delighted in games.

“You gave me gifts, God-Enchanter.   I give you thanks for good and ill.