Collected Poems

by Anthony Thwaite

Overview

Anthony Thwaite's Collected Poems, published as he reaches seventy-seven, give readers an opportunity to see gathered together all the poems he wants to preserve from the sixteen collections he has published since his debut in the Fantasy Poets series in 1953. Although his roots are partly in the Movement, he has developed a distinctive style – once described as 'cunningly modulated eloquence' – and a range of concerns which have defined his poetry from the beginning: memory, history, archaeology, travel (he has lived in Japan and Libya, writing of them with subtlety and affection), the intricacies of relationships, and now the frustrations of age. Through his own voice and those he has adopted (most memorably in 'The Letters of Synesius' and Victorian Voices), he has made a significant contribution to the literature of the last half-century, elegantly and perceptively setting the curiosities of the present against the layers of the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781904634393
Publisher:	Enitharmon Press
Publication date:	02/13/2008
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Anthony Thwaite was born in 1930. He spent his childhood in Yorkshire, the USA (1940-44) and Somerset. After national service in Libya he read English at Oxford. He then married and went to Japan for two years, where he taught English Literature at Tokyo University. Since then he has been a BBC radio producer, literary editor of the Listener and the New Statesman, co-editor of Encounter, and in 1986 was chairman of the Booker Prize judges. He is a literary executor of Philip Larkin and the editor of his Collected Poems. He is a regular reviewer for The Guardian and other journals. In 1990 he was made an OBE for services to poetry.