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The Nightfisherman

Selected Letters of W.S. Graham

W.S. Graham

Edited by Michael Snow and Margaret Snow

Cover Picture of The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters
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Categories: 20th Century, British
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (422 pages)
(Pub. Nov 1999)
9781857544459
£18.95 £17.05
Digital access available through Exact Editions
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • 'I've said about W.S. Graham's poetry: "His song is unique and his work is an inspiration". The same applies to this brilliant collection of letters. The subject is poetry. W.S. Graham drank and ate poetry every day of his life. These letters show an intelligence and sensibility ravished by language and conundrums of language. An explorer whose journey never ends.'
    - Harold Pinter
    William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) was born in Greenock, Scotland, 'beside the sugar house quays' - a setting open to the sea. He remained a Celt, moving from Scotland to Cornwall where he found seascapes without urban clutter, just an occasional ruined tin-mine with its human echo. In the 1950s and 1960s he became a key member of the artistic scene in St Ives. A friend of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon and many others, he could be demanding, but he gave back generously.

    A great poet, he is also a wholly original letter-writer, who can be traced from his twenties to his final years (1938-1985) through snow-drifts of correspondence interspersed with poems, drawings and prints. We begin in the passionate apprentice years, then Fitzrovia, the Apocalypse, his years in Cornwall after The Nightfishing (1955), and come at last to his apotheosis in a volatile brilliance and a wry wisdom of his late work. There is a 'Scots timbre' to his voice, a suppleness in tonal change, from raucous to tender, from elegy to anger and back again.

    He never set out to make his living from poetry - poetry made his life. Dedication and commitment to his craft produced an extraordinary body of work during a life lived wildly and to the full. These letters (interspersed with poems, drawings and prints) are a testament to the close intellectual and spiritual bonds which nourished his writing over many years.
    W.S. Graham
    William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) was born in Greenock in 1918. In 1938, after completing an apprenticeship in engineering, he went to study philosophy and literature at Newbattle Abbey. Starting out in a caravan in Cornwall in 1943, he dedicated his life to writing. His work includes The Nightfishing, and Malcolm ... read more
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