Try To Be Better

"W. S. Graham is both a great poet and a stubborn anti-hero for our age of seamless digital communications. Graham was always, utterly uncompromisingly aware of just how difficult it is to break silence or set down a mark in such a way that the distance separating two people will be bridged by meaning, by an image shared, by love. He spoke of his attempt to create 'a poetry of release' and of the poet's vocation - the effort, line-by-line and day-by-day, of 'trying to be better'.Try To Be Better is a wonderfully various collection of responses to Graham's work. Taking their cue from individual 'prompts' - a line or an image from his poems, letters and notebooks - some 35 contemporary writers and visual artists discover what Graham releases in their own art. It's exactly the kind of conversation, full of taut silences, vivid tangential thoughts and sudden confluences of awareness, that Graham aimed for. Admired by T. S. Eliot and Harold Pinter (among many others), Graham is still the least read of the great modern British poets. In revisiting and re-energising his legacy, Try To Be Better is a unique and very timely project. It enters territory that is inaccessible to purely academic study, 'releasing' Graham's poetry for a new phase of life in a new generation. It proposes a model for alternative forms of literary critique and response that it would be good to see more widely adopted." - Michael Bird.…