Peter, Peter, Popcorn Eater

Listening to - Innocence and Experience - Blake Babies

I broke by pledge not to but books until I had finished all the current ones. For all my complaints about Andrew Motion, I bough his biography of Philip Larkin (along with Larkin's collected poems for useful reference as AM would say). The review on the back says something about not an ounce of boredom it its pages. I do hope the reviewer is right. Anyway, as I sat in the cafe yesterday I looked for the Larkin poem that was read on the BBC poems-read-by-ever-so-good-actors programme. I could not remember the title but I knew it was about one of those Church tombs for a great man and his wife and hence An Arundel Tomb. Look at the rhyme scheme - ABBCAC - a sort of perverse limerick and the actual words - a brilliant poem. Now Larkin was not a man I would really like to have met; the impression I have from my limited knowledge of his life is not of a nice man. I am prepared to have my image of him altered by Mr Motion and therefore I have to give some leeway to my dislike of our famous laureate.