John Birtwhistle | |
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Born | John Birtwhistle 28 June 1946 Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, England |
Notable work |
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John Birtwhistle (born 1946) is an English poet published by Carcanet Press.[1] His libretto for David Blake’s opera The Plumber’s Gift (1989) was staged by English National Opera at the London Coliseum and broadcast on BBC Radio 3.[2]
Birtwhistle won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1975.[3] His poetry has been recognized by an Arts Council bursary, an Arts Council creative writing fellowship (1976–78), a writing fellowship at the University of Southampton (1978–80) and a Poetry Book Society recommendation for Our Worst Suspicions (1985).
Birtwhistle has had three concert libretti set and performed.[4] Some of his early poems were translated by Ștefan Augustin Doinaș and published in Romanian.[5] His 1996 libretto for The Fabulous Adventures of Alexander the Great by composer David Blake was translated into Greek.[4]: 2
From 1980 to 1992, Birtwhistle was a Lecturer in English at the University of York, teaching mainly the seventeenth century and Romantic periods.[1] He has written on Goethe’s Italian Journey[6] and on Humphry Davy.[7] He has edited and annotated John Clare's essay Popularity in Authorship.[8] From 2012 to 2017, he was a literary contributor and eventually an Associate Editor of the quarterly BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care.[1] Birtwhistle is married to a Consultant Anaesthetist and since 1992 he has lived in Sheffield with his family.[1]
Birtwhistle has been described by Ian Hughes as a "master craftsman."[9] Dick Davis wrote that Birtwhistle’s poems “celebrate the vulnerable and immediate.”[10] Dennis O’Driscoll commented in Hibernia that "a sweeping imagination ranges over past and future, pastoral and urban themes" and John Heath-Stubbs described Birtwhistle as "an ambitious and original poet, not afraid to take chances", singling out a group of poems on Connemara as "altogether admirable for their exact and loving observation."[11] Peter Jay wrote that Birtwhistle "produces a dazzling array of poems on a range of historical, political and personal subjects. These lucid, witty, tender poems, by turns serious and comic, are full of felicitous surprises and unexpected turns of imagination."[12] Poet Carol Rumens wrote in The Guardian that "[Birtwhistle's] work is consistently both shaped and calm, and energised by the various tides it travels."[13]