REMEMBERING DONALD ATKINSON: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs reflects on the relatively short career of a very original poet and adds some personal memories.
There was a most regrettable omission in my Editor’s Notes for the latest posting of London Grip New Poetry – namely a failure to mention the recent death, in early February 2025, of the poet Donald Atkinson. This oversight is made all the worse by the fact that Donald was a good friend who gave me much sound advice at the time when I first began to write poetry (more of that later).
Donald was an occasional contributor to London Grip between 2011 and 2016 but the greater part of his considerable poetic output appeared between 1988 and 2005. He began writing poetry in his late fifties after a career as a teacher and a director of youth theatre; but when he arrived on the scene in 1988 he did so in spectacular fashion by winning both the Peterloo Prize and the TLS and Cheltenham Festival Poetry Prize. His first collection A Sleep of Drowned Fathers was published by Peterloo in 1989 and went on to win the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize in 1990. Donald published four more collections with Arc Press – Graffiti for Hard Hearts (1992), Othello in the Pyramid of Dreams (1996), A Constant Level of Illumination (2001) and a New & Selected entitled In Waterlight (2004). After that there was only one more late flowering: Keeping Time – Poems 2005 -2016 which was self-published and reviewed here in London Grip.
The unusual and evocative titles of his collections reflect the fact that Donald’s poetry could be both complex and uncompromising in its approach to difficult subjects. His debut collection was a portrayal of an unhappy family including a very frank treatment of a troubled father and son relationship. In his subsequent work he continued to deal with powerful and sometimes destructive forces lying at the heart of human experience, ranging from religion to sexuality. But the elegance and precision of his language often transcends any grimness in his subject matter and he is able to bring a mythic grandeur to very ordinary human concerns and weaknesses. Thus Othello in the Pyramid of Dreams brings together voices from the Shakespeare play and elements from ancient Egyptian funeral rites and astrology in order to explore ‘the genesis of male insecurity, and its healing’. Those last three words are very important because Donald approaches painful situations with – at least – a desire to understand them and – at best – a hope of finding a route to redemption.
Of course Donald’s books do also contain gentler elements in the form of love poems, landscapes and wry humour. Keeping Time, in particular, explores such softer themes throughout although the shadow of mortality and the relentless passing of time often hover in the background. Once again, let me repeat that some extracts from this final collection can be found here. And this is rather important because there does not seem to be much of his work available online. The interested reader must therefore seek out his books on the Arc website or via internet booksellers. His work certainly deserves to be remembered and cherished; and it occurs to me now that there could very well be a PhD project based on a study of his poetry and its sources in literature and psychology.
Turning now, if I may, to the personal, I can report that I first met Donald in the late 1980s, just at the time of his initial poetic successes. It is largely due to his natural modesty (but also to my ignorance then of the wider poetry world) that I did not immediately realise I was encountering a celebrity! The place of our meeting was a poetry group in Toddington , a small village just north of Luton. In the last quarter of the 20th century the Toddington Poetry Society (TPS) punched well above its apparent weight and numbered some very notable poets among its members including, for example Archie Markham and John Cotton. Donald edited (and I believe founded) the Bedfordshire poetry magazine Spokes and he accepted my first published poem for the winter issue of 1989. That alone would earn him a special place in my memory! Over the next five or six years he raised the profile of Spokes from a local to a national magazine. While doing so he still managed to include several more of my compositions; more importantly, however, he was a constructive editor who helped me begin to understand the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful poem. He also gently but firmly taught me to respect an editor’s authority and judgment when I protested about an accepted poem of mine being held over for a future issue rather than being published immediately.
Donald told me once that he knew, in spite of his considerable early success, that he wouldn’t become a major celebrity in the poetry world for the simple reason that he had started too late. This recognition may have led him to form and share some broader views on poetic ambition, a few of which I am only now beginning to take on board. He encouraged me (and others too, I’m sure) not to fret too much about maximising the number of magazine publications (and worrying if they weren’t in the best magazines) and not to lose sleep over finding a publisher as soon as possible for one’s first (or next) collection. He held out an alternative vision of poets drawing their essential satisfaction from building a local readership – a regular workshop, reading group like TPS or just a like-minded “tribe” of trusted friends. (These days, “local” might not be based entirely on geography since poems can be shared across all kinds of territorial boundaries. Donald would I think be pleased to know that I observe a certain camaraderie between some regular London Grip contributors … ) Of course wider recognition – if and when it comes – and is both welcome and enjoyable too. But the positivity of that core readership can remain a sustaining force when other rewards are in short supply.
Donald outlined this recipe for a healthy poet’s life (which I hope I have paraphrased adequately) as we sat together in a Bedfordshire orchard in summer 1995. As things turned out, we both moved away from Bedfordshire (for similar reasons but in opposite directions) quite soon afterwards. Hence our face to face meetings in the last thirty years were rather few and far between – but were always warm and stimulating when they occurred. To learn of his death at the age of 93 was not surprising; but I am now very aware of the absence of a significant figure in my life. And I need to re-read his books to remind myself of his wise and distinctive voice.
Mar 3 2025
Remembering Donald Atkinson
REMEMBERING DONALD ATKINSON: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs reflects on the relatively short career of a very original poet and adds some personal memories.
There was a most regrettable omission in my Editor’s Notes for the latest posting of London Grip New Poetry – namely a failure to mention the recent death, in early February 2025, of the poet Donald Atkinson. This oversight is made all the worse by the fact that Donald was a good friend who gave me much sound advice at the time when I first began to write poetry (more of that later).
Donald was an occasional contributor to London Grip between 2011 and 2016 but the greater part of his considerable poetic output appeared between 1988 and 2005. He began writing poetry in his late fifties after a career as a teacher and a director of youth theatre; but when he arrived on the scene in 1988 he did so in spectacular fashion by winning both the Peterloo Prize and the TLS and Cheltenham Festival Poetry Prize. His first collection A Sleep of Drowned Fathers was published by Peterloo in 1989 and went on to win the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize in 1990. Donald published four more collections with Arc Press – Graffiti for Hard Hearts (1992), Othello in the Pyramid of Dreams (1996), A Constant Level of Illumination (2001) and a New & Selected entitled In Waterlight (2004). After that there was only one more late flowering: Keeping Time – Poems 2005 -2016 which was self-published and reviewed here in London Grip.
The unusual and evocative titles of his collections reflect the fact that Donald’s poetry could be both complex and uncompromising in its approach to difficult subjects. His debut collection was a portrayal of an unhappy family including a very frank treatment of a troubled father and son relationship. In his subsequent work he continued to deal with powerful and sometimes destructive forces lying at the heart of human experience, ranging from religion to sexuality. But the elegance and precision of his language often transcends any grimness in his subject matter and he is able to bring a mythic grandeur to very ordinary human concerns and weaknesses. Thus Othello in the Pyramid of Dreams brings together voices from the Shakespeare play and elements from ancient Egyptian funeral rites and astrology in order to explore ‘the genesis of male insecurity, and its healing’. Those last three words are very important because Donald approaches painful situations with – at least – a desire to understand them and – at best – a hope of finding a route to redemption.
Of course Donald’s books do also contain gentler elements in the form of love poems, landscapes and wry humour. Keeping Time, in particular, explores such softer themes throughout although the shadow of mortality and the relentless passing of time often hover in the background. Once again, let me repeat that some extracts from this final collection can be found here. And this is rather important because there does not seem to be much of his work available online. The interested reader must therefore seek out his books on the Arc website or via internet booksellers. His work certainly deserves to be remembered and cherished; and it occurs to me now that there could very well be a PhD project based on a study of his poetry and its sources in literature and psychology.
Turning now, if I may, to the personal, I can report that I first met Donald in the late 1980s, just at the time of his initial poetic successes. It is largely due to his natural modesty (but also to my ignorance then of the wider poetry world) that I did not immediately realise I was encountering a celebrity! The place of our meeting was a poetry group in Toddington , a small village just north of Luton. In the last quarter of the 20th century the Toddington Poetry Society (TPS) punched well above its apparent weight and numbered some very notable poets among its members including, for example Archie Markham and John Cotton. Donald edited (and I believe founded) the Bedfordshire poetry magazine Spokes and he accepted my first published poem for the winter issue of 1989. That alone would earn him a special place in my memory! Over the next five or six years he raised the profile of Spokes from a local to a national magazine. While doing so he still managed to include several more of my compositions; more importantly, however, he was a constructive editor who helped me begin to understand the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful poem. He also gently but firmly taught me to respect an editor’s authority and judgment when I protested about an accepted poem of mine being held over for a future issue rather than being published immediately.
Donald told me once that he knew, in spite of his considerable early success, that he wouldn’t become a major celebrity in the poetry world for the simple reason that he had started too late. This recognition may have led him to form and share some broader views on poetic ambition, a few of which I am only now beginning to take on board. He encouraged me (and others too, I’m sure) not to fret too much about maximising the number of magazine publications (and worrying if they weren’t in the best magazines) and not to lose sleep over finding a publisher as soon as possible for one’s first (or next) collection. He held out an alternative vision of poets drawing their essential satisfaction from building a local readership – a regular workshop, reading group like TPS or just a like-minded “tribe” of trusted friends. (These days, “local” might not be based entirely on geography since poems can be shared across all kinds of territorial boundaries. Donald would I think be pleased to know that I observe a certain camaraderie between some regular London Grip contributors … ) Of course wider recognition – if and when it comes – and is both welcome and enjoyable too. But the positivity of that core readership can remain a sustaining force when other rewards are in short supply.
Donald outlined this recipe for a healthy poet’s life (which I hope I have paraphrased adequately) as we sat together in a Bedfordshire orchard in summer 1995. As things turned out, we both moved away from Bedfordshire (for similar reasons but in opposite directions) quite soon afterwards. Hence our face to face meetings in the last thirty years were rather few and far between – but were always warm and stimulating when they occurred. To learn of his death at the age of 93 was not surprising; but I am now very aware of the absence of a significant figure in my life. And I need to re-read his books to remind myself of his wise and distinctive voice.