John Heath-Stubbs was one of the defining poets of his age, a legendary performer (being blind, he recited even his major narrative poems from memory). This new selection by the young poet and critic John Clegg essentialises an abundant poet and cele...

In "The Sound of Light" John Heath-Stubbs, now in his eighties, gives us a coherent, shaped, celebratory volume on an antique model and scale, revealing once more how inexhaustible and adaptable forms – traditional and free verse – can be when handle...

John Heath-Stubbs's new book is more elegiac, but no less firm in its celebrations, than his last, "Sweetapple Earth" (1993). As he reflects in his poem "The Ascent", "The poems in my file are bleak enough, / Written in the knowledge one I loved,/My...