September 2010

Nomination: The Trees [2 June 1967. From High Windows]

I have chosen ‘The Trees’, which I first published in the New Statesman when I was literary editor, on 17 May 1968. I also like the fact that it was one of the first poems to be used in the London ‘Poems on the Underground’ scheme, and a framed version of that early manifestation is in our dining room here in Norfolk. It’s one of the most magically inevitable of Philip’s poems, and at the same time one of the most surprising. When he’d finished it, he asked Monica: ‘Do people still write poems like this?’

Anthony Thwaite