Tom Cook

poet critic person · typographer @FaberBooks · contributor @theTLS · known birdwatcher · you could hire me to typeset something: [email protected]

[Tom Cook @TomCook24]

My most recent piece for @theTLS is a review of Helen Vendler’s final book of essays on poetry. A truly brilliant collection overall, though she was wrong about Ocean Vuong, who is – as we know – shit.

GET IT HERE:

https://t.co/RhVOaHCmot

[Liam Gallagher @liamgallagher]

bob dylan like a rolling stone - Google Search https://t.co/mG8EJZBLAY

[NJ @NoJusticeMTG]

Incredible

[Tom Cook @TomCook24]

@PaulDeane3 Do you think? I’d have to look at OED etc. but my immediate instinct is that it’s ‘wield against’ or (e.g.) ‘wave at’

[Tom Cook @TomCook24]

‘wield at’

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

"pretentious" is the word the unambitious wield at the ambitious.

[john v. variety ❤️.U.∞ OUT NOW @johnvvariety]

Bob Dylan absolutely deserved that Nobel. Few minds in music have come up with such concepts as riding through the desert on a nameless horse, or being stuck in the middle with you

[Tom Cook @TomCook24]

@MorganThomas32 @AndyBurnhamGM By Jove, I think you’ve cracked it, Morgan! This should be on every front page!

[Ian Leslie @mrianleslie]

Paul McCartney on bumping into Bob Dylan at the airport

[Tom Cook @TomCook24]

Longfellow continuing the grand old tradition of poems about Shakespeare that start off well then crash headfirst into a brick wall

[Immortan Joe Mazzulla @normal_jake_]

she cooked lmao

[Steven Hyden @Steven_Hyden]

I am seeing* Bob Dylan tonight!

(*actually a sliver of Bob Dylan visible between a hoodie and an enormous piano.)

[coffee @eventualforever]

the scene in Hamnet where Paul Mescal does the To Be Or Not To Be speech is one of the most embarrassing scenes of 2025

[Christopher @molochofficial]

C. S. Lewis really gets it sometimes

[Christopher @molochofficial]

I just think it's neat that Shakespeare decided to cap off his career in the theatre by writing the only honest poems ever written

[Tom Cook @TomCook24]

@hecubian_devil So glad to see this. I’m currently finishing up a review of it and feel like I’ve been going insane talking to people about it. The first act sets her up as such an astonishing character; then Hamnet dies and she becomes a line-repeater (‘London.’ ‘London?!’) and gawper

[Cassie Pritchard @hecubian_devil]

Still completely baffled by this sequence where Buckley decides to play Agnes—wife of a playwright—as an infant seeing a play for the first time, or perhaps someone raised by wolves being reintroduced to human society. It goes on for what feels like 20 minutes. It’s unbearable.

[Tom Cook @TomCook24]

@paperbacked Oh fantastic – thank you very much!

[Tom Cook @TomCook24]

I’m rereading Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) this morning. They’re much parodied, but they really are stunning; proof, however inconvenient, that the prose poem exists.

(Does anyone recognize the quote in the second stanza? Is it, knowing him, something from e.g. Ruskin?)

[Dr Bai🪱 @doctorbaixue]

Full offense but if as an academic I ever used AI to do any research for me, summarize any readings, or write any of my work, I would be so incredibly humiliated and ashamed of myself.

[Tom Cook @TomCook24]

(It could equally, of course, be the voice of a schoolmaster? I don’t bloody know)

[Tom Cook @TomCook24]

(I have tried googling it, but Google is fucked now because of AI, and anyway all the search results lead back to… Geoffrey Hill’s 1971 collection of prose poems, Mercian Hymns)