Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

John Cotton, a regular contributor to Acumen, was the most ebullient poet I ever knew. Small of stature but large of life, he always reminded me of a genial ex-colonel, full of fun and good thoughts. Charles Lamb wrote, ‘It is a lie that poets are envious, I have known the best of them and can speak to it, they give each other their merits, and are the kindest critics as well as best authors’. John Cotton was the one poet whom I am confident would echo that, for he was generous in his view of other’s work and, even more crucially, possessed genuine modesty. In his obituary for The Independent, John Mole, who knew the poet intimately over many years, brought out these qualities and wrote, ‘always with the bonus of laughter’ which is exactly right: John Cotton, more than any poet I ever knew, was ‘a poet of laughter’.

   Some years ago I produced an anthology of what I felt were neglected poets, prefacing each contribution with a short biography. I wrote of John:
 
   ‘… there is an element of common sense at the heart of Cotton’s poetic, “I explore my emotions and attitudes and, of course, the language in which I express them. If I succeed in this it is for others to judge.” A great truth is revealed there, for not many poets can face up to the fact that it really is for others to judge. Cotton is thoroughly alive to our heritage and landscape, with a nice line in nostalgia (not sentimentality), yet absolutely aware of, and reflecting, the changes that TV, the cinema, and general Americanisation, have brought about. Someone contemporary, compassionate, and completely aware of all sides of nature and life from the beautiful to the bad; and with the sort of ear which can produce a language in poetry which is neither aureate of diction nor excruciatingly demotic, but plainly and truthfully unaffected. A poet who is humourous without straining to play the funny man, a poet who gives you sex without any impression of prurience, not neatly gentlemanly nor philistinely realistic: John Cotton is that man,’

   Finally I would like to pay tribute to both the courage and humour of this ex-Royal Navy Commando (this fact alone is proof of his courage), and I cannot better his last words to Patricia and me, ‘I see Peter Russell’s fallen of his perch. What a pity …’ and he added a wry comment about how life (or death) gets to us all in the end. Courage, laughter and generosity … and a poet too, who deserves his own perch in the history of poetry of the Twentieth Century.