ALAN JENKINS was born Kingston, Surrey, 1955, and brought up in the south west London suburbs; educated in London and University of Sussex; has worked at the TLS since 1981, first as poetry and fiction editor and, for the past ten years, as deputy editor. Was a regular poetry critic on the Observer and then the Independent on Sunday, 1985-1990, and has reviewed for all almost all the national weeklies at some time or other. Has taught creative writing for Bread Loaf, Vermont; Princeton; Arvon Foundation and the Poetry Society, London. Currently teaches a weekly seminar in poetry at the American University in Paris. Won a major Eric Gregory Award for poetry in 1981 and since then has published In the Hot-House (1988), Greenheart (1990), Harm (1994), which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection that year, and The Drift (2000), which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Lives in London, has travelled quite a bit in Europe and rather less everywhere else. Co-owns and crews a twenty-eight foot all-wood sloop.

THE LITTLE BLACK BOOK
Alan Jenkins,
Limited Edition,
ISBN 1 899980 09 1  paper, 246x154  40 pp £9.50
Images by Robert McNab

'The Little Black Book is a fine example of the three qualities that make the poetry of Alan Jenkins stand out in the contemporary scene: an acute insight into the heart of our dilemma with time's passage and its loses, an honest courage in the way he treats his subjects that often leaves him, unlike his more defended contemporaries, exposed and vulnerable; and the quality that drives and underscores the first two: an existential lonliness of a rawness we normally associate with Baudelaire or Verlaine.'

        
        Young women with damp hollows, downy arms,
        bare burnished legs - you see them striding
        towards their plant-filled  offices, riding
        bicycles to flatshares after work; lunchtimes, you stare
        as secretaries, backpackers tanned from birth
        peel off their things and stretch on sun-warmed earth.
        A few of them stare back... As if they'd share
        their world of holidays and weekend farms 

        with you! They step more lightly every year,
        a glimpse of neck-hair, a scent that lingers, girls
        who, swinging bags with shops' names, disappear,
        trailing glances, into crowds; each one unfurls
        her special beauty like a fragile frond
        before your famished eyes. I am what lies beyond, 
        they seem to say, beyond the mortgage, car and wife -
        I am what you deserve, I am the buried life

        you will never live.

Of previous books;
'Alan Jenkins is a rare and exemplary presence in the world of current poetry. He has directness and intensity but he is also quick-witted and has real technical prowess. Above all, these poems, we feel, had to be written.'    Ian Hamilton