A publisher paid tribute to “someone who has quietly become one of our best poets” at the launch of a collection covering 45 years of poetry. Tim Dooley is a tutor for the Poetry School and a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster. He has been a long-serving teacher, has worked with prisoners as an arts mentor for the Koestler Trust and has been reviews editor of Poetry London for a number of years. Eyewear publisher Todd Swift said of him: “He has become beloved in British poetry. He is kind, witty, thoughtful – and his integrity is 100 per cent.”

Dooley was reading from The Sound We Make Ourselves, a collection of selected poems from 1971 to 2016. His poetry combines personal themes with public ones. The title poem of his collection describes a walk with his son along a canal at a time of riots in the 1980s; ‘The Length of Spring’ describes a friend’s funeral in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003; ‘A True Story’ is apparently about the outrage of locals at marauding seagulls in St Ives, with a councillor addressing a meeting and demanding ‘We want our town back.’ “ For this latter poem Dooley was unafraid to add performance poetry to his repertoire with a series of squawks and cries. I know Tim Dooley’s poetry because I have been one of his Poetry School students. He did not read them on Monday, but also in this collection are two masterly and warm poems about pop music – one about learning to drive and the Beatles, and another about a Grail-like search for an old Dansette vinyl record player, which culminates with the playing of the Otis Redding song Try A Little Tenderness.  

There was another big event at Eyewear’s winter party at the Koppel Project “creative hub” in London’s Baker Street on Monday – the launch of the Collected Poems of Terence Tiller, which brings back into print, after more than 40 years, the work of a Cambridge don who became trapped in Cairo in 1940 and wrote for the rest of the war with his friend and fellow poet Keith Douglas. Douglas died while Tiller went on to a career at BBC radio, producing the first adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

The Collected Poems, on the centenary of the poet’s birth, includes an introduction by Todd Swift, pictured left, whose PhD was partly on Tiller, a preface by Tiller’s grandson Matthew, and poems by both Matthew and his mother – Tiller’s daughter – in appendices to the volume. Matthew was there at the launch, too, reading poems by all three poets in the family. Also on the bill was William Logan, who has been described both as “America’s Geoffrey Hill” and “the most hated man” in US poetry, according to Swift. Logan divides his time between the US and the UK, and the poems he read included a sestina about Donald Trump and Brexit.

And that wasn’t all – a clutch of poets who have had pamphlets published by Eyewear in its Aviator series were there to read, too.  They included Samuel Tongue, with poems about whales and Wales, Tara Skurtu, who had  travelled from Romania to take part, £1,500 Melita Hume prize winner Jenna Clake, pictured left, and James Flynn, who had brought his one-week-old daughter along for her first poetry event. It all added up to a high-spirited and packed event, with free entry, wine and mince pies, presided over with flamboyant showmanship by Todd Swift. He praised Monday night’s audience for buying lots of books and pamphlets, but complained about a recent reading of Eyewear’s mammoth The Poet’s Quest for God anthology, at which only one copy of the £25 volume was sold. “Poetry is freedom – but it isn’t free,” he exclaimed. Greg Freeman   

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