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The Italian Visitor

Grey Gowrie

The Italian Visitor by Grey Gowrie
10% off Paperback
Categories: 21st Century, British
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (Unspecified)
(Pub. Jul 2013)
9781847777775
Out of Stock
Paperback (80 pages)
(Pub. May 2013)
9781847772329
£9.95 £8.96
  • Description
  • Contents
  • Reviews
  • From the opening poem, an extended elegy for the Cold War's ambivalent mix of irresponsibility and prosperity, to a concluding short memoir of Robert Lowell, The Italian Visitor is a book about memory. The title sequence, an account of a 1940s' childhood, unravels time by placing Grey Gowrie's eight-year-old self in fictional relationship with another poetic hero, Eugenio Montale. The Italian visited 'bankrupt, utilitarian' Britain in 1948, in his early fifties. There are love songs from the Portuguese, a ballad about the birth of Israel and elegiac poems for those districts of London now occupied mainly by overseas tycoons. Gowrie has also included a selection of the occasional verses he wrote in the years when poetry left him.
    I
    The Andrians
    Preface 
    The Andrians

    II
    The Italian Visitor
    Preface 
    Eastbourne 
    Black Trout: Reading 1948 
    Argyll Tour: Glasgow 1948 
    Crescent Wind: Edinburgh 1948 
    Ely 1948 
    Metropolitan Christmas 1948 
    Syria 

    III
    Fado Poems and a Ballad
    Preface 
    Madrugada 
    Vielas De Alfama 
    Lembrai-te da Nossa Rua? 
    A Ballad of Bo-oz and Ruth 

    IV
    A Kensington Vespers
    Numbers 
    Lines 
    Reece Mews 
    Reece Mews: Conversation Piece 
    Genesis 
    A Kensington Vespers 
    Of Paradise 
    Primavera for Pembroke Gardens 
    Winter Song 

    V
    Nursery Rhyme for Ninety
    Nursery Rhyme for Ninety 
    Four Eight Two Thousand 
    Letter to James Tate 
    The Bidden Guest 
    Bread-and-Butter Letter 
    Clerihew 
    Ballade Tragique 
    A Cannelopouliad 
    A Refusal 
    An Horatian Ode on the Visit of Lucy Ann Josephine Butler Sloss to her Grandparents 
    Birthday Card for Francesca von Habsburg 
    Portrait of the Writer as a Regency Rector 
    Bellocian Border Ballad 
    Lament 
    Angela’s Dream 

    VI
    Memoir
    Remembering Robert Lowell 
    Sisters 

    Notes 
    Acknowledgements 
    Praise for Grey Gowrie 'Grey Gowrie's great Third Day: New and Selected Poems - a fine, stoical portrait of the age - fulfils all expectations'.
    Derek Mahon, the Irish Times, 29 November 2008
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