Annual Journal 2025

I am not sure you should have a ‘favorite poet’ as this can tend to blinker the appreciation of others and what they have to say. But, if you really had to choose I would say that Louis MacNeice does it for me. I have dabbled with other ‘favourites’  - Browning at school, Auden for a time and both before and after his death, I’ve loved Clive James - a wordsmith genius across so many writing styles. But for a long while now, despite passing fads, the real favorite has been MacNeice.

Louis just seems always to be there - ready with a poem or a single line that strikes at a truth I am wrestling with or an emotion I am feeling. He is long dead, of course, leaving us in 1963 when I was eight and hardly knew what poetry was. But, in the intervening 62 years in which I have written screeds and screeds of poems myself (some good enough, I hope), I have come to love poetry with a deep affection and gain huge pleasure from reading and learning from it every day.

There are ‘favorite’ individual poems - too many to mention but John Masefield’s Cargoes, Edward Thomas’ Adelstrop and Leigh Hunt’s Abou Ben Adhem would be up there. But, possibly number one is the long, autobiographical work Autumn Journal Louis MacNeice penned towards the end of 1938 and published in 1939.

Written between August and December 1938, Autumn Journal describes MacNeice’s world and views as war between Germany was becoming more and more inevitable.  In twenty four parts, with an average of 80 lines per section, the poem talks of everyday things and MacNeice’s love life but importantly presages the impending gloom at the prospect of conflict and bad times ahead.

Louis MacNeice's famous poem

As a fan of MacNeice’s style, Autumn Journal is a masterpiece of lyric language conjuring so many evocative scenes and emotions. But it also stands as a major, poetic, historical statement at the very cusp of world changing events that have shaped so much of the world we live in today.

Which brings us to the present moment and how the world looks now with, I believe, equally momentous events emerging. Trump, Putin, Ukraine, Gaza, Israel… all are having huge impacts on the global scene and economy with devastating potential for the future. Add to this the gloomy prospects of climate change, population dispersal, the drug trade, the nihilistic effects of social media and much more, then today looks like MacNeice’s 1938 all over again.

And the parallel goes on. In Germany, Spain and other countries, in 1938 the growth of fascist and far right movements were in full swing. Today we have Trump, MAGA, the far-right conspiracy theorists that work like a cancer throughout societies, deepened by social media.  In the UK, we see Reform and Farage  beginning to eclipse the already very right-wing Tory Party, becoming the home for increasing numbers of people across the land. People driven there by years of racist media manipulation, anti-liberal rhetoric, anti-European bile, pro-ultra capitalist agendas born by the Thatcher era and decades of government in-action and under investment in the public good. Think private water companies and utilities now operating for the shareholder dividend not the common man or woman.

So, as a MacNeice fan and an attempt to set 2025 in context, I started my own Journal  - but one tracing external and personal events throughout the year not just in Autumn. A poem per month making my own Annual Journal.

Click below for the sections from January to July - the following months will be added as we go.

The world right now is a very dangerous place, as it was in 1938, and on many fronts - conflict, the natural world, politics etc - outcomes are almost impossible to predict. In 1938, the world had to endure the catastrophe of world war to emerge into a period of relative peace - not everywhere of course - that has lasted to the present day, certainly for my own lifetime.  What lies ahead of us in the next year or so?

Annual Journal 2025