Alan Jenkins (poet)

Alan Jenkins (born 1955 in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey) is an English poet.

Jenkins was brought up on the outskirts of London in Richmond, and educated at the University of Sussex, and has worked for The Times Literary Supplement since 1981, first as poetry and fiction editor, and then as deputy editor. He was also a poetry critic for The Observer, and the Sunday Independent from 1985 to 1990. He edited the "Collected Poems of Ian Hamilton" (Faber & Faber, 2009).

He has taught creative writing for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Arvon Foundation, the Poetry Society, London, and at the American University in Paris. He was a judge for the Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes.

"One sometimes thinks that the personal past, those childhood reveries and glints of sunlight on far-off summer lawns that FR Leavis so detested in the work of Edith Sitwell, is about all the modern English poet has left - that, and a fatal habit of parading his influences to the point where what gets written is often only a variation on an existing text. To suggest that the dominant note of Alan Jenkins's new collection is elegiac is not, in the end, to say a great deal, either about his poems, Jenkins himself or even his development as a writer. In the Hot-house (1988), his first outing - this is the fifth - came crammed with exactly the same kind of aching reminiscence: maternal shadows in the Eden-era nursery, the "flushed, unfussed, unreluctant, dapper" figure of Jenkins senior, the rueful acknowledgment of influence, the sail-boat nosing along a pre-lapsarian Thames. All these - taken out, dusted down and re-examined - contribute something to A Shorter Life's prevailing air of lamp-eyed brooding."

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