Born in Glasgow in 1944, Tom Leonard has made the city’s voices heard throughout Scotland, and beyond. ‘If you don’t treat language seriously, you don’t treat people seriously’: the consequences of this statement are apparent in all of his work, notably that involving the transcription of Glasgow speech. Leonard’s political, aesthetic and linguistic concerns are inextricable. His poetry contrasts different voices, social classes, emotional registers, philosophies. It is often funny but fiercely so.

He has been writer-in-residence in libraries and universities, and in the anthology Radical Renfrew, he trawled the Paisley archives to reconstruct the region’s literary past from the French Revolution to the First World War. His own work has been collected in Intimate Voices (1984), Reports from the Present (1995) and access to the silence: poems 1984-2004, powerfully presenting what Edwin Morgan has called ‘the authenticities and indignations which have moved him to act and write’. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.

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Related links

› Tom Leonard's website

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Books I love

An old favourite
'The McGibbon and Kee 4 volumes of the Complete Poems of William Carlos Williams published in the 1960’s I keep going back to. Unlike later editions the poems here are given the breathing space that allows much of the work to be a poem to a page—and space is important in the work of someone like Williams. '

Newer favourites
'I’m very keen on the work of the poet Robert Lax. His A Thing that Is (New Poems, Overlook Press 1997) and Love Had a Compass (Journals and Poetry, Grove Press 1996) give me a lot of pleasure. '

A current interest
'In music I have just moved on from listening to the complete keyboard sonatas of Haydn that I bought in a cheap box on original instruments, to working my way now through the complete quartets, again in a box I bought at a bargain price featuring the Angeles quartet. I love Haydn.

In poetry I am episodically putting together an anthology of my own favourite twentieth century stuff, featuring people like Lax and his fellow Americans Creeley, Dorn, Blackburn, Niedeker. I don’t know if I will attempt to have the selection published when the project is complete.'

Tom Leonard, May 2006

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Featured poem

Being a Human Being

for Mordechai Vanunu

not to be complicit
not to accept everyone else is silent it must be alright

not to keep one’s mouth shut to hold onto one’s job
not to accept public language as cover and decoy

not to put friends and family before the rest of the world
not to say I am wrong when you know the government is wrong

not to be just a bought behaviour pattern
to accept the moment and fact of choice

I am a human being
and I exist

a human being
and a citizen of the world

responsible to that world
—and responsible for that world

Tom Leonard © 2005