Poetry
Introduction
Here are nine selections of poems written over the last twenty-five years (with a few from earlier). I've divided them into nine 'books':
Tony Blair Reminds Me Of A Budgie contains all the poems published in 1996 under that title, nearly all of them from New Statesman. It adds some extra poems.
Labour Pangs is a later selection of poems which covers (roughly) the first three years of Labour in office (1997-1999), and these too come in nearly every case from New Statesman. Not all of them are about domestic politics, but the majority of them are.
Make Mine A Double is a further selection of satirical poems from New Statesman from 2000 – 2002, and adds some other poems written since. The title poem refers to the suggestion that Osama Bin Laden had ten lookalikes to prevent him from being captured.
Since 2002, I have continued to write weekly poems on The Weekly Poem.
Send-Up is a selection of parodies, send-ups, comic poems, and other frivolous material, some of which started life as entries to the competitions in New Statesman and The Spectator, amongst others, and several of which have been anthologised – in about thirty anthologies. They date between 1978 and about 2005.
Love Poems – these are what they say they are, although they also include poems of loss.
Rime Present is a collection of rhyming poems, some of them serious, some of them the reverse. About the only thing they have in common is that they rhyme (which isn't to say that there aren't rhyming poems elsewhere).
Robinson Crusoe's Bank Holiday Monday and Looks Familiar contain two collections of a range of poems from the 1980s to about 2002. Some are deeply meaningful, and some are deeply meaningless. You decide.
Muse Poems and others - in Impossible Objects, there was a sequence of 'Muse' poems - but it was much longer. Here are the missing ones, with a couple of other poems from the same period (2004-2007)
Web Poems - there are also links to poems published on the web, all since 2007
“Bill Greenwell has an awesome facility for writing topical verse at very short notice.” – Francis Wheen, The Guardian
“Bill Greenwell is the satirist who writes the marvellous topical verses at the front of New Statesman... he has a poet's head and heart.” – Adrian Mitchell
“He has the satirist's nose for the self-revealing (and self-undoing) remark, and runs rings round the leaden-footed promulgators of leaden-witted preposterousness. There are echoes of Roger McGough and also the late, great Gavin Ewart... It's all good stuff.”
- Simon Rae, Poetry Quarterly Review
I would like to thank Steve Platt, Paul Anderson, Vicky Hutchings, Ian Hargreaves and Peter Wilby for supporting my contributions to New Statesman. I would also like to thank Peter Sansom and Lawrence Sail for all the constructive criticism they have offered me. I would also like to thank Basil Ransome-Davies and David Silverman for making a straight fight of it every week and month in the various weekend competitions in which we slug it out.
