Samuel Tongue

So please do join us if you're able.

If not, please go and have a look at Robin Robertson's poetry across the web, but also in the Scottish Poetry Library, as we have a lot of his collections on our shelves.

So come in, borrow and enjoy.

Thanks very much for listening.

Well hello everybody and welcome to our regular Nothing But The Poem podcast.

My name's Sam Tung and I'm the Projects Coordinator here at the Scottish Poetry Library.

And one of the projects that I coordinate is a Nothing But The Poem regular meeting where we meet online, a group of us who are all friends of the SPL,

and we discuss poets poems normally about three or four together we read them twice we read them through and we discuss what we think they might mean how the poem is working what impact it's having on us those kinds of things it's a very gentle kind of introduction to a poet or a kind of a reminder of a more of a if you already think you know the poet

It's really nice to have reread their work and also read it as a group, read it as a community and see what impact it has in that group and in that shared conversation.

So the poet that I had selected for this month is Jack Gilbert.

There's a couple of reasons for this.

One of the joys of working in a poetry library is that you get to physically walk the stacks.

I think that is still for me.

one of the best ways for poetry books to fall into my hands, sometimes literally.

I like, obviously, I love going into bookshops and I love going into libraries because there's a certain sense in which you're there, the serendipity is very much at work.

Maybe the algorithms are at bay for a short time.

I mean, I'm not naive enough to think that they...

can stay at bay then they have informed my sense of what's hot and what's not but at the same time a library is more of an archive and more of an entering into poetry.

So I was walking the stacks and saw that we had some of Jack Gilbert's work on our shelves and

And the reason that it jumped out for me was that also quite a few poets and poet friends of mine have cited Jack Gilbert as an influence or as somebody who's poetic they really like to engage with and they enjoy.