WHAT BOOK . .?

...are you reading now?

I’M TAKING my time with a brilliant anthology called A Poet For Every Day Of The Year, edited by Allie Esiri. It’s a book that does exactly what it says on the tin, presenting a poet for you to meet and take your time with every day; to savour, enjoy, read, re-read and return to, knowing that there’ll be another one along tomorrow.

There are contemporary poets here such as Imtiaz Dharker and Brian Bilston as well as older names including Edward Lear and Emily Bronte.

Most excitingly, there are poets I’ve never heard of, such as the writer of the poem for May 27, Catherine Maria Fanshawe, whose life straddled the 18th and 19th centuries and whose poem Riddle On The Letter H plays with language in a profound and exciting way. Or should that be whay?

...would you take to a desert island?

WHEN I was on Desert Island Discs a few years ago I chose The Long And The Short Of It, the collected poems of the late, great Roy Fisher, one of the finest English poets of the past 60 years in my humble opinion. Maybe I’ll take that one again, but perhaps I’ll take my favourite book of all time, the magnificent Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.

Published in 1947, the novel tells the tale of the last 24 hours in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British Consul in a small Mexican town called Quauhnahuac on The Day of the Dead just at the start of World War II.

In a sense the plot doesn’t matter because Lowry’s epic and artful prose is what drives the book along.

His sentences sing and his paragraphs dance, and my ambition would be to stay on the desert island long enough to learn the book and perform it as a one-man show when I got home!

...first gave you the reading bug?

FIVE On Kirrin Island Again by Enid Blyton. The lives of Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog weren’t much like mine in Barnsley, but old Enid certainly knew how to keep you at the edge of your seat.

By making the Famous Five the centre of the adventures she made sure that you kept turning the page. And they had an Uncle Quentin who had a boat. And I only had an Uncle Charlie who had a shed!

. . . left you cold?

ANY instruction book leaves me cold, which is why I can never fix anything or make it work. As far as I’m concerned they’re works of fantasy fiction but not so well-written.

■ My Sand Life, My Pebble Life: a Memoir Of a Childhood and The Sea, by Ian McMillan, is out now (adlard Coles, £10.99).