Published: 29 July 2010
by JOHN HORDER

ANTHONY Thwaite is a GMP: a great minor poet. He would deny the “great”, however, having been too much in awe of the likes of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. And now Enitharmon Press has marked his 80th birthday by publishing a volume of Late Poems. 

Thwaite confronts his father head-on in the last line of the last poem of this wondrous new set of 14, Ancestors. It has the characteristic Thwaite ring of truth about it: 
My father died thirty-one years go. 
Up in the attic, stacked in musty boxes, sit 
His precious notebooks, genealogies, 
Family trees, even a coat-of-arms 
He asked a Herald to construct to show 
That we were once armigerous – how vain 
in every sense... Now, in my eightieth year, 
The whole accumulation weighs me down. 

I have no time for my ancestors.” 

Nothing inconclusive about that ending.
One of Thwaite’s most loved poems in his Collected Poems (Enitharmon, 2007) was Simple Poem: 
This is the simple poem I have made. 
Tell me you understand. But when you do 
Don’t ask me in return if I have said 
All that I meant, or whether it is true. 

I have no false modesty reviewing Anthony Astbury’s wonderfully wild anthology, A Field of Large Desires, with its beautiful cover and preface by Grey Gowrie. The only poem of lasting genius, Stevie Smith’s To Carry The Child, was included in the Greville Press pamphlet I co-edited for him in 2002. Smith’s authentic poetic genius speaks here with toughness and tenderness. 

I cannot forgive Astbury, though, for including two of Gillian Allnutt’s Lizzie Siddall: Her Journal sequence, but not her ode to her bicycle. The most characteristic poem here is WS Graham’s The Beast in the Space. It begins: “Shut up. Shut up. There’s nobody here”.

Anthony Thwaite’s inner five-year-old will understand George Oppen’s two-line poem of lasting genius, Old Age, published by Anthony Rudolf’s Menard Press in 1990: 

What a strange thing to happen To a little boy 
Perhaps Rudolf will ask his partner, the artist Dame Paula Rego, to make a painting of it.  

• Late Poems by Anthony Thwaite (Enitharmon Press, Kentish Town); A Field of Large Desires, edited by Anthony Astbury; A Greville Press anthology 1975-2010, preface by Grey Gowrie (Carcanet, £14.95); Philip Larkin’s Letters to Monica, edited by Anthony Thwaite, will be published by Faber & Faber on October 21