Gavin Bantock

{{short description|English poet}}

Gavin Bantock (born 4 July 1939) is an English poet; he is the grandson of Granville Bantock.{{cite news |last1=Corkill |first1=Edan |title=British drama coach Gavin Bantock at top of his game; casts take a bow |url=https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2012/06/26/our-lives/british-drama-coach-gavin-bantock-at-top-of-his-game-casts-take-a-bow/ |accessdate=31 October 2020 |work=Japan Times |date=June 26, 2012}} He was born in Barnt Green, and attended New College, Oxford, where he won the Richard Hillary prize for poetry.{{cite web |title=Gavin Bantock |url=https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=1491 |website=Carcanet Press |accessdate=31 October 2020}}{{cite journal |last1=Matthias |first1=John |title=Some Longer Poems About World War II |journal=Dispatches from the Poetry Wars |date=November 20, 2019 |url=https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/commentary/some-longer-poems-about-wwii/ |accessdate=31 October 2020}} He traveled to Japan in 1964 on the advice of his father, Raymond, and returned five years later to teach at Reitaku University. He has remained in the country ever since. Initially teaching English language and literature at Reitaku, he began also leading a group of students in productions of English plays, which eventually became his primary career. After retiring from Reitaku in 1994, he became the drama coach at Meitoku Gijuku High School in Kochi.

Many of Bantock's poems treat elements of Christianity, history, mythology, or medieval and Renaissance literature in arresting, often disturbing terms. His book-length poem "Christ," first published in 1965 and issued in a revised edition in 2020, is skeptical of "any idea of an innate and preordained divinity in an incarnate Christ," according to Adrian A. Husain's introduction to the revised edition.{{cite book |last1=Bantock |first1=Gavin |title=Christos: Lovesong of the Son of Man |date=2020 |publisher=Brimstone Press |location=Buckhorn Weston |isbn=9798685521552 |page=xi}} His poems "Joy" and "Dirge" were included by Philip Larkin in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse.{{cite book |editor-last1=Larkin |editor-first1=Philip |title=The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse |date=1973 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford |isbn=0198121377 |page=621}} John Matthias included excerpts from Bantock's "Hiroshima," which Matthias calls "terrifying," in the collection 23 Modern British Poets.