Terry Gifford: A green voice

Poet and scholar Terry Gifford looks back on his life as a teacher – firstly in English secondary schools and then in higher education – and on his work as a critic, an ecocritic, a scholar of pastoral and post-pastoral literature, and as a poet who has written nine collections of poetry. He also reflects on his work as a leading authority on the poetry of Ted Hughes, and on his collaborations with fellow Hughes scholar Neil Roberts. This article ends with a selection of Gifford’s poetry from his eighth collection, A Feast of Fools (2018) and his ninth collection, unpublished at the time of writing. This article is based on a recorded conversation with Mick Gowar.