Tom Pow was born in Edinburgh and now lives in Dumfries, where he is currently Head of Creative and Cultural Studies at Glasgow University’s Crichton Campus. He was poet in residence at the StAnza poetry festival 2005. He has recently published several books for children, and the record of a poets' correspondence and poems, Sparks!, with Diana Hendry. Landscapes and Legacies (iynx, 2003), his fourth collection of poems, was shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council’s book of the year award. Dear Alice: Narratives of Madness (Salt, 2007) won the poetry category in the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards 2009, in partnership with the Scottish Arts Council. His latest book is In the Becoming: Selected and New Poems (Polygon, 2009).

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Related links

› More about Tom Pow on www.contemporarywriters.com
› Tom's Dying Villages project

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Books I love

An old favourite
'I was privileged to help in the selection of the unpublished poems included in Norman MacCaig’s new collected – The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon). His late readings were extraordinary – it was like hearing pure speech, stripped of artifice. It’s wonderful to have these poems added to the published works. And, as a complete contrast, Technicians of the Sacred, edited by Jerome Rothenberg, first published in 1968, remains an inexhaustible treasure.'

A new favourite
'Adam Zagajewski and Tomaž Salamun. As someone who was electrified by the Penguin Modern European Poets series in the late 60s, I’ve always loved the dissonant voices from Eastern Europe. Both of these poets are very different, but both their poetries seem alive with the tensions between tragic despair and delight at the sheer unpredictability of life.'

A current interest
'For the past few years, I’ve been working on a series of poems that first drew on the place where I work, the former Crichton Asylum for Lunatics, and then broadened their horizons. The poems explore the spectrum we are all on. As an example and to mark the big anniversary celebrations of Don Quixote, here is a poem of the same name.'

Tom Pow, June 2005

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Featured poem

Don Quixote

“Today he’s the unhappiest creature
in the world, the poorest too, and
tomorrow he’ll have two or three
kingdoms to hand over to his squire.”
(Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes)

For whatever reason, it’s common
that, after years of obstinate madness,
the mind recomposes itself. Women
whose names were once the soul’s very purpose

become mired in time with the rest of us.
In this brief breathing space before the end,
our lives’ adventures seem ridiculous:
the losses they brought too late to amend.

But still it falls to poor Don Quixote
to put right to himself and his companion
the wild falsehoods he mistook for glory.

“Don’t die,” Sancha pleads with the failing don.
Now he would exchange, for one last story,
three kingdoms on which the sun never shone.

Tom Pow © 2005