James Kirkup

James Kirkup was brought up in South Shields, England, and was educated at Westoe Secondary School, and then at King's College, Durham University. During the Second World War, he was a conscientious objector, and worked for the Forestry Commission, on the land in the Yorkshire Dales and at the Lansbury Gate Farm, Clavering, Essex. He taught at The Downs School in Colwall, Malvern, where W. H. Auden had earlier been a master. Kirkup wrote his first book of poetry there; this was The Drowned Sailor, which was published in 1947. He moved south with his partner to Gloucestershire in 1952, and became a visiting poet at Bath Academy of Art for the next three years. Moving on from Bath, Kirkup taught in a London grammar school before leaving England in 1956 to live and work in continental Europe, the Americas and the Far East. In Japan, he found acceptance and appreciation of his work, and he settled there for 30 years, lecturing in English literature at several universities. ==Blasphemy case==

Kirkup came to public attention in 1977, after the newspaper Gay News published his poem "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name", in which a Roman centurion describes his lust for and attraction to the crucified Jesus. In the Whitehouse v Lemon case, Mary Whitehouse, then Secretary of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, successfully prosecuted the editor of the newspaper, Dennis Lemon, for blasphemous libel under the Blasphemy Act 1697. ==Poetry==

After the writing of simple verses and rhymes from the age of six, and the publication of The Drowned Sailor in 1947, Kirkup's published works encompassed several dozen collections of poetry, six volumes of autobiography, Kirkup's home town of South Shields now holds a growing collection of his works in the Central Library, and artefacts from his time in Japan are housed in the nearby Museum. His last volume of poetry was published during the summer of 2008 by Red Squirrel Press, and was launched at Central Library in South Shields. ==Bibliography==

Kirkup's papers are held at Yale and South Shields. New Zealand composer Douglas Mews set two of Kirkup's poems to music: Japan Physical for soprano and piano and Ghosts, Fire, Water for unaccompanied choir and alto solo. Ghosts, Fire, Water was written for the University of Auckland Festival Choir which performed it at the International Universities' Choral Festival in New York and at other concerts on its world tour in 1972. The poem from Kirkup's anthology No more Hiroshimas: poems and translations was based on three of the Hiroshima Panels. Audiences were affected by the poignancy and emotional power of the work and it has continued to be part of the choral repertoire. ==References==