Ben Wilkinson

This ambitious new collection from poet and critic Ben Wilkinson finds its author experimenting with poetic voice and the dramatic monologue. Carefully crafted yet charged with contemporary language, the book brims with everyone from cage fighters to boy-racers, cancer patients to whales in captivity.
Several poems unpick the preconceptions and prejudices that can inform so many of our encounters – with the world, art, and one another – while others take a sideways glance at everything from male depression to the history of meat-eating; from the philosophy behind athletic competition to surreal yet familiar emotions.
Notable here are poems that wrestle with the mystery of failed and successful relationships, both providing moments of transcendence and despair. There are well-observed pieces about sport, particularly the rewards of running, from a noted devotee.
Wilkinson has also been deeply inspired by the French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96), ‘stepping into the shoes’ and finding affinity with that poet’s astringent tone and ruthless clarity, borrowing his ‘punchy and musical’ phrasing. These add to the volume’s tonal and imaginative range.
While empathetic and often moving, Same Difference is a collection that seeks to undermine the confessional mode, keeping the reader on their toes and asking just who is doing the talking. It is also formally elegant, often using traditional rhyme and metre to weave its arguments.

Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain's major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.

Way More Than Luck is the vivid debut collection from the well-known young poet and critic Ben Wilkinson. The book opens with a series of poems that, with a remarkable clarity and sympathy, recall a battle with clinical depression: the “days when you weren’t anyone. Days gone undercover...”. The author interrogates this malady: “two-parts sadness, one-part anger”, grapples to understand that its sources are both personal and cultural. It soon emerges that competitive running, which possibly starts as therapy, a means of combat, becomes a way of life, not just for fitness but for the long-haul, for endurance. The poet finds a still, calm centre: “Running is the pure solitude of a wordless hour.” The collection centres on a series of vivid character portraits, giving life to the legends of Liverpool Football Club. With characteristic self-deprecation Wilkinson calls this section ‘An Ordinary Game’ and kicks things off with the Bill Shankly quote: “What a great day for football. All we need is some green grass and a ball.” In various inventive forms that echo the characters they celebrate or decry, the author finds in football an apt field for human display. Bruce Grobbelaar shoots a ball straight at the ref’s face; old-school Billy Liddell still inspires hymns in the stands; Stevie Gerrard is the soul of “grit”; the “dancing shadow”of John Barnes endures racism: “dark slurs circle the stands”; Fernando Torres is a latter-day Icarus. These poems recapture both the childish wonder of the young fan and the die-hard faith of adult fans undefeated by cynicism or rain.
The final section, ‘An Absurd Pastime’, contains more occasional poems, about the writing life, both the graft of the craft and the petty indignities of performance as in ‘You Must Be Joking’ where a comedian must, by the brutal trial and error of stand-up, discover the means to laughter. Here, there are also poems about dreams, fraught with strange vertigo. There are also a number of tenderly hesitant love poems. There is an enjoyably vicious satire of the anodyne non-promises of a conservative party speech. Most notably, many poems in this collection are in artfully invisible poetic forms. Their rhymes and repetitions are wonderfully woven to suit content and expression. Way More Than Luck is a beautifully serious debut by a more-than-promising young author, Ben Wilkinson.