Ten Poems about Getting Older Various Authors

This fascinating mini-anthology of poems selected by John McCullough – which includes the three winners of our ‘getting older’ poetry competition – opens with an enlivening meditation on the meanings of the word ‘spry’. The speaker delights in hopping up and down some hotel stairs when no one is looking and in the fact of being “inescapably me”. It matters not one jot that he is:

“like a dancer running out of melody, a boulevardier running out of boulevard, a prizewinner running out of shelf;” from ‘Hop’ by Alasdair Paterson