And Michael Fried breaks into verse: Your usual dozen perfect lines / A dozen eyedropper drops of cloudless pain / which

And Michael Fried breaks into verse: "Your usual dozen perfect lines / A dozen eyedropper drops of cloudless pain / which taken internally would surely kill" ("Pain"). Ian Hamilton is 60 this year, and two dozen friends and admirers have gathered between these handsome covers to look back over his semi-legendary life and times, from the young Oxford turk whipping poetry's soft underbelly to the grand old critic, essayist and biographer of today, reclining on the masthead of the LRB, scourge of Poets Laureate, poets democratic and performative, poets who breed like rabbits and scatter their verse-droppings throughout the length and breadth of this scepter'd isle, nibbling on subsidised lettuce leaves and the trickledown culture dispensed by Saatchi and Saatchi. Editing was clearly in Hamilton's blood. The young mastermind of the Oxford Poetry Society launched an undergraduate magazine Tomorrow, which soon mutated into The Review, the best poetry journal since Eliot's Criterion, Connolly's Horizon and Grigson's New Verse. Reputations were coolly assessed or dismantled, standards promulgated, a new style of poetry encouraged, by Imagism out of confessionalism: short, sharp, painful, oblique. "The reader is offered only the intense, climactic moment of a drama - the prose part, the part which provides the background data, is left to the imagination," Hamilton wrote in 1970, when his The Visit was published.

Thus the Vietnam war flickered on-screen in a corner of the living room while the real business of suffering goes on centre-stage in the protagonist's head.Literary journalism kept him going in between the famously few tight- lipped poems. The Review was made over into the larger and glossier New Review and became required reading throughout the 1970s, publishing Ian McEwan's early stories, Hugo Williams's lapidary, hedonistic poems, and giving early encouragement to Julian Barnes, Craig Raine, Martin Amis, Clive James, Jonathan Raban, Douglas Dunn and many more. It lasted 10 glorious and controversial years, operating out of a little office in Soho's Greek Street, handily adjacent to the Pillars of Hercules, which became the office extension."There was .. a streetfighter element to him," says Julian Barnes "He stared people down in pubs. He offered to go outside with them if they wanted to prove their point. Hamilton drank all day and was never seen the worse for wear Oh, and another thing: he never paid you.

He told you your stuff was marginally OK, printed it with pained regret, and then sent you a cheque which bounced." John Berryman was actually thumped, we gather, or at least brawled with, though sadly there are no details. Several contributors observe that at lunch he smoked while he ate and was working on a means of smoking while he slept. "Eating" meant rearranging the food on his plate while getting in another couple of bottles and a carton to see him through to teatime."I don't like to inflict retrospective damage on his reputation, but he was .. very nice to me," adds Barnes McEwan reports the same: he was "the Gaffer ... someone whose presence and example made you write as well as you were able." Williams says: "Almost single-handedly, with his high intensity lyric poems and equally high intensity reviews, he hacked a way out of the Movement and we all followed gratefully in his tracks towards a particular kind of emotional symbolism." This was loweringly dubbed Minimalism by some It was meant to be morally bracing both on and off the page. "If a poem isn't there you'll never find it, no matter how hard you look," Hamilton remarked later. Peter Porter likened his poems to the masts of the scuttled German Fleet at Scapa Flow.Craig Raine, who worked for a while as The Review's books editor, comes at the matter with a gnomic anecdote.

As the Gaffer turns from the bar at the Pillars, Raine asks him how his weekend went with his estranged nine-year-old son, by a previous marriage "He could hardly speak His eyes were spangled with tears `Great.' My own eyes filled Then we recovered And that was exactly how the poems were supposed to work The laconic lifting into lyric, tight-lipped Vulnerable. Irresistible."Dan Jacobson turns in the only regular piece of literary criticism, fondly illuminating the "abrupt thwarting of narrative expectations ... an act of abstemiousness or self-abnegation which helps to convey a sense of irremediable loss". Michael Hoffman, who says he collects copies of The Visit like cigarette cards, suggests, "A bit of 1910, a bit of 1960, and a bit of 1860 in the stately Matthew Arnoldesque crumble of the iambs." In less admiring quarters the poems are sometimes suspected of being all snaffle and no horse.