Lifesaving Poems

A word about Bart Simpson. The epigraph at the head of this anthology comes from an early episode of The Simpsons.

Billy Collins says: ‘Good poems are poems that I like’. A

pieces gathered here first appeared, in slightly different form, at www.anthonywilsonpoetry.com. Fra

The Power of Poetry’, a keynote speech at the annual conference of the National Association of Teaching English, June 2014. I

For her help with the preparation of this manuscript I am indebted to Anna Clarke.

Acknowledgements to the copyright sources of poems in this anthology are given after each poem. Where not otherwise specified, permission has been given by the publishers cited.

teaching of Tim Borton, who showed us John Logan’s ‘The Picnic’.

is not underestimating the case to say it changed me forever. Because of it, I still think of reading poems as like falling in love.

Lifesaving Poems began life as notebook, then a blog

To make things interesting, I allowed myself no more than one poem per poet.