Thinking over what I wrote about the late Clive James this morning, I began searching for a recent edition of his collected poems. He has written a lot of stuff ( including an original translation of Dante's 'The Inferno'!) and as I waded through one impressive tome after another, I came across Somewhere Becoming Rain, a volume of his writings about Philip Larkin. Readers of this blog (surely none -ed.) will know that Larkin is my favourite poet, someone I return to over and over again, so I bought the book online and look forward muchly to its arrival.

You know how 'way leads onto way', at least for me, so soon after these musings my mind was racing back to Yorkshire in 1990. I had just arrived in the delightful medieval town of York with a busload of Australian students (long story!) and was free to roam its precincts for a few hours. Having come into the UK via Hull, I was twitching to get my hands on one book, 'The Collected Poems' of Philip Larkin. I say twitching because Larkin had been a university librarian in Hull and my requests for a 'small diversion' via said campus were most rudely denied.

Entering a bookshop on or near The Shambles, I rushed to the poetry section and found a couple of volumes of 'The Collected Poems' sitting neatly on the shelves. It was an expensive outlay but I bought a copy on the spot, then decamped to York Minster, where I read "Church Going" in one of the crypts of that colossal pile. Eccentric, geeky? - you decide!

Larkin has had some bad press in recent decades, mainly because he liked Mrs Thatcher and was found with a box of old porn magazines under his bed. Somehow this makes him less than a great poet in certain quarters. The same feeble analysis has been brought to bear on any writer, artist or actor who has dared to transgress some ludicrous arbitrary standard set up by gate-keeping po-mo dullards. I would rather have my soul sucked from my living body by a dementor than endure an hour of their prattlings on some forlorn campus.

But I digress. James on Larkin sounds to me like a delicious and irresistible attraction and I hope the book wings its way here soon. Meanwhile, consider this wonderful poem by PL, composed in the early 1950's. It is full of the kind of subdued wonder, yearning and regret that Larkin makes his own, so often.

Maiden Name

Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
For since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,
Lying just where you left it, scattered through
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two,
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon -
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since your past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
Instead of losing shape and meaning less
With your depreciating luggage laiden.