Anthony Simon Thwaite

Anthony Simon Thwaite Poems

Anthony Simon Thwaite Biography

Anthony Simon Thwaite, OBE, (born 23 June 1930, in Chester) is an English poet and writer. He is married to the writer Ann Thwaite. He was awarded the OBE in 1992, for services to poetry. He was mainly brought up in Yorkshire and currently lives in Norfolk. During World War II he stayed with relations in the United States. He was educated at Kingswood School, Bath (1944–49) and subsequently read English at Christ Church, Oxford. He taught at Tokyo University from 1955 and 1957, and for a year in 1985. He has worked for BBC Radio, the New Statesman as literary editor, and from 1973 to 1985 as editor of Encounter with Melvin J. Lasky. He is one of the literary executors of Philip Larkin, and the major editor of Larkin's work.)

The Best Poem Of Anthony Simon Thwaite

The Barrow

In this high field strewn with stones
I walk by a green mound,
Its edges sheared by the plough.
Crumbs of animal bone
Lie smashed and scattered round
Under the clover leaves
And slivers of flint seem to grow
Like white leaves among green.
In the wind, the chestnut heaves
Where a man's grave has been.

Whatever the barrow held
Once, has been taken away:
A hollow of nettles and dock
Lies at the centre, filled
With rain from a sky so grey
It reflects nothing at all.
I poke in the crumbled rock
For something they left behind
But after that funeral
There is nothing at all to find.

On the map in front of me
The gothic letters pick out
Dozens of tombs like this,
Breached, plundered, left empty,
No fragments littered about
Of a dead and buried race
In the margins of histories.
No fragments: these splintered bones
Construct no human face,
These stones are simply stones.

In museums their urns lie
Behind glass, and their shaped flints
Are labelled like butterflies.
All that they did was die,
And all that has happened since
Means nothing to this place.
Above long clouds, the skies
Turn to a brilliant red
And show in the water's face
One living, and not these dead.'

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