Andrew Cranston

I mean, actually, when I was an art student, I did my dissertation on Hugh MacDonald as well.

He did stay with me and kind of emboldened something in me about, you know, when I was firmly in, become a painter, you know.

I don't really look much at his work now.

I've kind of drifted away from it.

But I would say, yeah, it was revelationary, really.

It was a revelation.

I mean, poetry kind of suits me in some ways because I haven't got a lot of time always to read novels.

So there's something about how you can read a poem.

You might digest it quite slowly, but it could be read quite quickly.

So consumed but digested slowly.

Elizabeth Bishop, I find really fascinating and has a really interesting relationship to looking and to seeing and to, you know, she made interest in drawings herself, actually.

Right, I didn't know that.

Yeah, but the way she describes a kind of environment or whatever she is...

Seamus Heaney I really like.

I've got a friend in Belfast who introduced me to lots of great Irish poets, including his uncle.

His uncle was John Montagu.

I mean, I like how poets deal with the past often as a sort of...

almost fragmentary moment that they'll reconstruct or revisit yeah not the same as nostalgia at all it's kind of much more given something an importance particularly like this elizabeth bishop poem about a dentist waiting room when she's seven years old and it's just the atmosphere and quality of the the memory of it and the struggle to remember it yeah in a way

I mean, what do you do with these lost things, you know, in a kind of way?

What do you have still inside you, you know, in a way?