Alan Jenkins (poet)
Encyclopedia
Life
He was brought up on the outskirts of LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in Richmond
Richmond upon Thames
Richmond is a town in southwest London, England and is part of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. It is located west-southwest of Charing Cross....
, and educated at the University of Sussex
University of Sussex
The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....
, and has worked for the Times Literary Supplement since 1981, first as poetry and fiction editor, and then as deputy editor. He was also a poetry critic for The Observer, and the Sunday Independent from 1985-1990. He has edited the "Collected Poems of Ian Hamilton" (Faber&Faber, 2009).
He has taught creative writing for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is a writers' conference held every summer at the Bread Loaf Inn, near Bread Loaf Mountain, east of Middlebury, Vermont...
, Arvon Foundation
Arvon Foundation
The Arvon Foundation is a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom which promotes creative writing. It is based in the Free Word Centre for literature, literacy and free expression in London.-History:...
, the Poetry Society
Poetry Society
The Poetry Society is a membership organisation, open to all, whose stated aim is "to promote the study, use and enjoyment of poetry".The Society was founded in London in February 1909 as the Poetry Recital Society, becoming the Poetry Society in 1912...
, London, and at the American University in Paris. He was a judge for the Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes
Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes
The Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes are annual prizes awarded to young British poets between the ages of 16 and 18, for poems submitted on a set theme. The prizes are administered by Christ Church, Oxford, and are funded by a bequest by the late Christopher Tower...
.
He lives in London.
Awards
- 1981 Eric Gregory Award
- 1990 Forward Poetry PrizeForward Poetry PrizeThe Forward Poetry Prizes were created in 1991. The aim of the prizes is to extend the audience for contemporary poetry. Until the T.S. Eliot Prize remuneration was increased to £15,000 plus £1000 to each of nine runners-up, the Forward was the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry...
, for Harm - 2000 shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, Poetry Book SocietyPoetry Book SocietyThe Poetry Book Society was founded by T. S. Eliot and friends in 1953. Each quarter the Society selects one recently published collection of poetry for its members. The Society also publishes the quarterly poetry journal Bulletin, and it administers the competition for the annual T. S. Eliot Prize...
Choice, for The Drift - 2005 shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, for A Shorter Life
- 2006 Cholmondeley AwardCholmondeley AwardThe Cholmondeley Award is an annual award for poetry given by the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom. Awards honour distinguished poets, from a fund endowed by the late Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley in 1966...
Reviews
One sometimes thinks that the personal past, those childhood reveries and glints of sunlight on far-off summer lawns that FR Leavis so detested in the work of Edith Sitwell, is about all the modern English poet has left - that, and a fatal habit of parading his influences to the point where what gets written is often only a variation on an existing text. To suggest that the dominant note of Alan Jenkins's new collection is elegiac is not, in the end, to say a great deal, either about his poems, Jenkins himself or even his development as a writer. In the Hot-house (1988), his first outing - this is the fifth - came crammed with exactly the same kind of aching reminiscence: maternal shadows in the Eden-era nursery, the "flushed, unfussed, unreluctant, dapper" figure of Jenkins senior, the rueful acknowledgment of influence, the sail-boat nosing along a pre-lapsarian Thames. All these - taken out, dusted down and re-examined - contribute something to A Shorter Life's prevailing air of lamp-eyed brooding.
Late in this American debut by the British poet Alan Jenkins, the speaker asks himself, "Are you still that suburban / boy who dreamed of taking opium with Baudelaire / or wine with Byron?" Yes and no, the middle-aged poet seems to answer. Throughout this stylish, bitingly autobiographical collection, selected from four previous volumes dating to the late 1980s, we see how Jenkins's early idealism has been transformed by the passage of time. What remains constant is his cool, velvety use of traditional prosody and forms.
A Shorter Life, Alan Jenkins's fifth and best collection, finds the poet less than impressed with his behaviour. The court of the self proves implacable. It is not enough to confess: there has to be judgement, too, in the form of ineradicable self-knowledge. Confession is the mode of the American Robert Lowell, of whom there are faint echoes here, while much of Jenkins's imaginative furniture is French: how interesting, then, that at times he should so strongly recall Philip Larkin, who did not like Abroad but had clearly read its poets all the same.