Poems

Cricket writer, author of acclaimed autobiographies, independent publisher, editor of the London Magazine, traveller, sportsman, Alan Ross was foremost a poet of high elegance, whose sixty years of work, from his commission in the Royal Navy in 1941 to his death in 2001, is selected and introduced in these pages by his friend David Hughes. Alan Ross's poems are always news. Indeed, he invented a poetic genre that extended well beyond occasional verse: poetry as a brief, intense form of journalism, easy to read, quick to stir response. He is reporter - cannier than most - from any front line he picks: battlefields of the spirit, convoys to Russia, post-war Germany, Iraq in the 1950s, South Africa in ferment, test matches at Lord's, the United States of the 1980s, his Indian birthplace and his Sussex homeland, but especially islands, those "interruptions of the diurnal". To convey public and private events, Ross sketches a shorthand of his own. At their chosen level, half documentary, half commentary, his images cast a cumulative light on the kicks and miseries of 20th-century war and love: running remarks on an active lifetime that outpace most prose.