"Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh – or, in that curious phrase, 'laugh out loud' (as if there’s any other way of doing it)?"

"Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never 'depressing.' Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown."

Wrote Martin Amis, in the introduction to "Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis," which I've been reading lately.

I bought this book after listening to the Larkin episode of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast," but that Martin Amis introduction did not spring to mind when I was reading the Martin Amis obituaries this morning, though I was trying to remember what small part of his writings I may have read.

I haven't read any of the novels, and though I bought his memoir "Experience" when it came out (in 2000), because I was intensely interested in memoirs at the time, but I didn't read much of it. I'd go back to it now if I still have it, or was it among the 50 grocery bags of books I sold to Half-Price Books when we were painting the old half of the house after the knob-and-tube removers drilled 40 holes in the walls/ceilings? 

I have read one Amis book linearly and carefully: "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million." ("The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a 'Comintern dogsbody' (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections.")

But I had been reading Martin Amis very recently when I heard that he died. Perhaps I should read one of his novels, which I must recognize I have actively avoided, going back to his earliest works, which I remember seeing piled on tables in bookstores and picking up and — feeling some aversion — putting back down. Why the aversion?