Alan Jenkins (poet)

Alan Jenkins
Born1955
Kingston upon Thames
NationalityBritish
Alma materUniversity of Sussex
GenrePoetry
Notable awardsEric Gregory Award,
Forward Poetry Prize,
Cholmondeley Award

Alan Jenkins (born 1955) is an English poet.

Life

Jenkins was born in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, brought up on the outskirts of London in Richmond, and educated at the University of Sussex. He 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 to 1990. He edited the "Collected Poems of Ian Hamilton" (Faber & Faber, 2009).[1]

He has taught creative writing for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Arvon Foundation, the Poetry Society, London, and at the American University in Paris. He was a judge for the Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes.[2] From 2015 to 2018 he was Poet in Residence at St. John's College, University of Cambridge.

Awards

Works
  • "Street Life". The Poem. Archived from the original on 2008-12-31.

Poetry
  • The Hot-House. Chatto & Windus. 1988. ISBN 9780701133122. OCLC 993149576.
  • Greenheart. Chatto & Windus. 1990.
  • Harm. Chatto & Windus. 1994.
  • The Drift. Chatto & Windus. 2000.
  • A Short History of Snakes: New and Collected Poems. Grove Press. 2001. ISBN 978-0-8021-3811-8. OCLC 45714829.
  • The Little Black Book. Illustrated by Robert McNab. Cargo Press. 2001. ISBN 9781899980093. OCLC 49949173.CS1 maint: others (link)
  • A Shorter Life. Chatto & Windus. 2005. ISBN 9780701178086. OCLC 57200164.
  • Drunken Boats. Illustrated by William Pownall. Sylph Editions/AUP. 2008. ISBN 9780955296345. OCLC 185081766.CS1 maint: others (link)
  • The Lost World. Clutag Press. 2010.
  • Blue Days. Illustrated by William Pownall. Redstone Press. 2010.CS1 maint: others (link)
  • Revenants. Clutag Press. 2013.
  • Marine (with John Kinsella). Enitharmon. 2015.
  • Paper-Money Lyrics. Grey Suit Editions. 2015.
  • Five Poems. Clutag Press. 2015.
  • White Nights. Sheep Meadow Press. 2018.
  • Tidemarks. New Walk Editions. 2018.

Reviews
  • The Guardian:

    "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."[4]

  • The New York Times:

    "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."[5]

  • The Independent:

    "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."[6]

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References
  1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2008-06-09. Retrieved 2009-05-30.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  2. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-04-15. Retrieved 2009-05-30.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  3. "Alan Jenkins - Literature". literature.britishcouncil.org. Retrieved 2018-01-16.
  4. D. J. Taylor (5 March 2005). "Flotsam on the human shore". The Guardian.
  5. Megan Harlan (20 January 2002). "Books in Brief: Fiction & Poetry". The New York Times.
  6. Sean O'Brien (3 June 2005). "A Shorter Life by Alan Jenkins". The Independent.
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