Thursday 12 December 2019

John Ash, 1948-2019

Very sad to read this morning of the death of John Ash, a very fine poet who somehow often seemed to slip below the radar of surveys of contemporary UK poetry (perhaps because he had lived and worked abroad for so long).

I first came across his work in a Bloodaxe anthology in the early 2000s. One poem, Visigothic, caught my eye more because of my interest in early medieval history than anything else, but its quality got me hooked, I read the rest of Ash's poems in there (maybe half a dozen), and he became one of my favourite poets, one of those names who you really want the rest of the poetry-reading world to know about, but who you also regard as your own secret.

Carcanet have what I think is his last published poem here – typically of him, it's elegant and witty on the surface, with a very serious centre. He'll be very much missed.

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