Harm

The new collection from one of the most engaging voices in contemporary poetry: a popular and accessible younger poet who reaches a wide audience.

Love hurts, and Jenkins tells just how much, in language alternately vulnerable, touching, vicious, whimsical - but always deeply recognisable.

Alan Jenkins was born in 1955. He lives in London and works for the <i>Times Literary Supplement.</i>

The poems in this, Alan Jenkin's third collection, speak of the harm done and suffered - most frequently in the name of love - in the course of lives gone adrift among lost causes, chance meetings and missed chances. A new directness and simplicity, and throughout, a raw urgency of personal feeling, inform a voice that is as resourceful as in Jenkin's earlier volumes, and continues to salvage a 'fugitive lyricism' (as one reviewer put it) from harsh and dissonant realities. 'By turns jocular, disquieting, sexy and inventive'-PETER READING, SUNDAY TIMES 'Jenkins' poetry is exhilarating. . . It is charged with erotic energy, rage, sorrow and confusion'-TLS 'Stylish, Savage, unforgiving'-HUGO WILLIAMS, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Jenkins has a restless mind: following his poetry gives his readers a rocky ride, but also a rewarding one. '-PETER PORTER, OBSERVER.

A Shorter Life

Best collection yet from Deputy Editor of the TLS. This is poetry as autobiography - a wonderfully poignant evocation of a genteel suburban upbringing, a wild youth and a regretful middle-age.

Alan Jenkins is Deputy Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and a prize-winning poet. His 1994 collection, Harm, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and, in 2000, The Drift was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize. He lives in West London

In his most eloquent and formally satisfying collection to date, Alan Jenkins plays a series of powerful and haunting variations on love and loss. The themes that run through our lives are relatively few, for all that they sound subtly different to each of us, with their own rich freight of places and faces. In poems that pay homage to what is unique to his own past experience - a suburban fifties upbringing, a heady youth of rebellion and exploration - Jenkins reminds us vividly of what is experienced by us all. The search for love (or failing that, sex), the passing of time and the inevitability of pain and grief, the struggle for transcendence against our awareness of limitation: these are the things that can suddenly seem to compose a life - a life not so much reduced to essentials as seen in its passionate essence, a 'shorter' life. Though not in any formal sense a sequel, this poignant book recapitulates some of the motifs of <i>The Drift</i> (2000) and earlier volumes, to offer an extended meditation on memory and recurrence, and a statement - compelling, candid, sorrowful and subtle - of life's beauty and brevity.

Alan Jenkins

ALAN JENKINS - POERTY IS EXHILARATING. . . . . IT IS CHARGED WITH EROTIC ENERGY, RAGE, SORROW AND CONFUSION. - DAVID LEHMAN The poeoms in Alan Jenkin's magnificent new collection are closely linked, forming a movingly autobiographical book which deals with the disjunction between the aspirations of youth and the realities of middle-age. The narrator looks back on his twenties, full of the grand ambition to be the next Rimbaud, and wryly contrasts it with his current situation: friends dead, women lost, opportunities missed. Images of drifting, of the random patterns that fate imposes on existence, weave their way through poems full of sea-scapes and sailing boats. Ghosts loom through the mist; objects imbued with memory accumulate like driftwood. But although Alan Jenkins writes about a sense of loss and failure -his rich poetry formally dextrous and inventive, witty and subtle in its allusions - acts as a counterbalance, showing how the twisting of an emotion into shape can salvage feelings of pointlessness. Through his personal experience, he explores themes that will resonate with a broad audience: the difference between men and women.

The Drift

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