[Nigel Mace]

I thought that I'd hold off putting in my second choice until we'd reached 50 - but impatient of the slow pace of contributions and partly stimulated by the discovery that names such as Auden were new to some - as have several American poets been to me - I have got to weaken

So... since I cannot enter MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle I must claim a place for John Betjeman's brilliantly crafted and magically, accurately evocative Summoned By Bells, which was not only conceived as a single book, but as an autobiography of his early years from childhood to his sending down from Oxford. I listened to his very first reading of the book on the Third Programme, night by night and chapter by chapter and sped to buy it from the old John Smith's bookshop in Glasgow as soon as it became available - the first hard-back book of new poetry of my own. It has never disappointed and phrases, lines and passages of it have rolled around in my consciousness ever since.

I suppose that for people not from the UK there will be resonances missing and reference points that will not strike quite the timbre in the mind and heart that they do here - but, for all that potential limitation set by his technique, the poem's slight catches of childhood, boyhood and youthful emotion and the anguish of family tensions which it brings to life will, I feel sure, stretch the Atlantic and further.

I am so tempted to offer a few quotations but having started on it, I have realised, swiftly, that once begun I would hardly be able to stop. If this wonderful work has passed you by, catch up with it now. There are plenty of copies on Abebooks from £500 odd for a signed copy to first editions with the dust jacket for 67pence plus postage from many places - but I loved finding it on offer from an outfit called Hemingway Ventures! Betjeman would have loved that.

Oh - and one quote is a must for this audience... Reproached by his furniture manufacturing father for his dilletante literary enthusiasms and urged to continue the firm, thereby "creating beauty" he responds...

"..... What is beauty?
Here where I write, the green Atlantic bursts
In cannonades of white along Pentire.
There's beauty here. There's beauty in the slate
And granite smoothed by centuries of sea,
And washed to life as rain and spray bring out
Contrasting strata higher up the cliff,
But none to me in polished wood and stone
Tortured by Father's craftsmen into shapes
To shine in Asprey's showrooms under glass,
A Maharajah's eyeful. For myself
I knew as soon as I could read and write
That I must be a poet. Even today,
When all the way from Cambridge comes a wind
To blow the lamps out every time they're lit,
I know that I must light mine up again."

Best to all,
Nigel