On the topic of living poets, who are you reading now?

I find myself reading more prose these days. Maybe it’s to do with middle age. You want something more expansive, something more elastic and accommodating. More narrative than lyrical distillation. I love the short story, the way it reads and stays in your mind like a poem. Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff — I admire them more than a lot of poets. Something about the compression, the warmth and depth and beguiling ease of the storytelling voice. Switching to prose, to the essay form in Between Stations, I found the room that I didn’t have in poetry, the space to let the thought and image grow. Reading Chatwin, Updike, all the wonderful prose stylists have helped in fusing the lyrical, expositional and narrative in the essays.

I have not turned away from poetry but I tend to re-read, go back to the staples rather than sample new poets. I go back, again and again, to Heaney, Yeats, Keats, Rilke, Larkin, Neruda, Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. There is such deep music in their poems; they have smuggled the ineffable essence of experience into their poetry, something that cannot be paraphrased or put in discursive terms. You get the feeling that they wrote because they had no choice, that they have answered the question Rilke posed to his young poet — Can you not live without writing? — and have gone on to write.

In each poet, you can see something pressing, something that demands to be given expression in a poem. Someone once said that all that a writer needs for his/her entire career is just one theme. Keats and Stevens meditating on the imagination and beauty, Rilke on the spiritual power of poetry, Larkin on “the solving emptiness” under it all, Heaney on place and displacement, Bishop on questions of travel. These poets have tracked the theme to the furthest reaches of their lives and imagination, and fetched back the unsayable, something so profoundly beautiful, joyous or tragic that it can’t be explained. In the end, it’s a state close to music that the poem discovers and inhabits and through that, the experience is being communicated or embodied. I can read the ending of Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” over and over — “there swelled/ A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain” — and get a sense of solace from its rhythm, from what it is gesturing to. There are others I love — Cavafy, Du Fu, Mark Strand, William Matthews, poets whose work resonates with a sense of a lived life. You are not just reading the poem and admiring its craftedness, but encountering a person, a human being trying to make sense of a particular situation.