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Cricket writer, author of acclaimed autobiographies, independent publisher, editor of the "London Magazine", traveller, and sportsman, Alan Ross was foremost a poet of high elegance, whose sixty years of work, from his commission in the Royal Navy in 1941 to his death in 2001, is selected and introduced in these pages by his friend David Hughes. Alan Ross's poems are always news. Indeed, he invented a poetic genre that extended well beyond occasional verse: poetry as a brief, intense form of journalism, easy to read, quick to stir response. He is reporter - cannier than most - from any front line he picks: battlefields of the spirit, convoys to Russia, post-war Germany, Iraq in the 1950s, South Africa in ferment, test matches at Lord's, the United States of the 1980s, his Indian birthplace and his Sussex homeland, but especially islands, those "interruptions of the diurnal". To convey public and private events, Ross sketches a shorthand of his own. At their chosen level, half documentary, half commentary, his images cast a cumulative light on the kicks and miseries of 20th-century war and love: running remarks on an active lifetime that outpace most prose. I At sea 1II Post-war 39III Home and colonial 65IV In Africa 89V North from Sicily 107VI Return journeys 133VII Across America 165VIII Situations 221IX Departures and discoveries 257.


Alan John Ross, (May 6, 1922 – February 14, 2001), was a British poet and editor. He was born in Calcutta, India, where he spent the first seven years of his life. When he was sent to be educated in Falmouth, England, Ross spoke better Hindustani than English.

In 1940 he went to read modern languages at St John's College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Ross represented the university at both cricket and Squash but did not complete his studies after joining the Royal Navy in 1941.

During his first two years in the Navy, Ross served on several destroyers escorting supply ships to the Soviet Union. On December 30, 1942 Ross was almost killed whilst serving aboard HMS Onslow when he was trapped in the ship's hold, which was flooding, before he was rescued. This moment was immortalised in his poem J.W.51B a convoy.

After he was demobilized in 1946 Ross decided not to resume his studies at Oxford but instead tried his hand at journalism. In 1946 his first poetry collection The Derelict Day was published, it contained poems he had written whilst in the Navy.
--Wikipedia