John Birtwhistle (born 1946) is an English poet published by Carcanet Press. 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.
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Career
Birtwhistle won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1975. 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. Some of his early poems were translated by Ștefan Augustin Doinaș and published in Romanian. His 1996 libretto for The Fabulous Adventures of Alexander the Great by composer David Blake was translated into Greek.
From 1980 to 1992, Birtwhistle was a Lecturer in English at the University of York, teaching mainly the seventeenth century and Romantic periods. He has written on Goethe’s Italian Journey and on Humphry Davy. He has edited and annotated John Clare's essay Popularity in Authorship. From 2012 to 2017, he was a literary contributor and eventually an Associate Editor of the quarterly BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care. Birtwhistle is married to a Consultant Anaesthetist and since 1992 he has lived in Sheffield with his family.
Critical reception
Birtwhistle has been described by Ian Hughes as a "master craftsman." Dick Davis wrote that Birtwhistle’s poems “celebrate the vulnerable and immediate.” 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." 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." 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."