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New Selected PoemsVernon WatkinsEdited by Richard RamsbothamForeword by
Categories: 20th Century, Welsh
Imprint: Fyfield Books Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (144 pages) (Pub. Jun 2006) 9781857548471 £9.95 £8.96
Brought back into print in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of Vernon Watkins' death.
Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was called by Kathleen Raine: 'the greatest lyric poet of my generation.' Dylan Thomas referred to him as: 'the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English', or, in a letter, as 'the only other poet except me whose poetry I really like today.' Philip Larkin wrote: 'In Vernon's presence poetry seemed like a living stream, in which one had only to dip the vessel of one's devotion. He made it clear how one could, in fact, 'live by poetry'; it was a vocation, at once difficult as sainthood and easy as breathing.' All Watkins's poetry was published by Faber & Faber in his lifetime, and he was friends with such widely differing poets as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Kathleen Raine. When he died, in 1967, he was being considered for Poet Laureate, after the death of John Masefield. Since that time, however, although a few have continued to praise his poetry very highly, public awareness of it has ceased almost completely, creating a bizarre gap in the perception of 20th century poetry. 100 years after Watkins's birth (June 27th, 1906), New Selected Poems of Vernon Watkins offers the first widely available selection of his poetry since his death, with a new introduction and notes, outlining the literary and biographical context of his work, and a foreword by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. It is a rare joy thus to be reintroducing the work of a major poet to a new generation of readers.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury ix Introduction xi from The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd (1941) The Collier 1 Griefs of the Sea 3 Two Decisions 4 Stone Footing 5 from Ballad of the Mari Lwyd 5 from The Lady with the Unicorn (1948) Music of Colours: White Blossom 10 The Feather 12 Crowds 13 Lover and Girl 13 Gravestones 14 The Listening Days 15 from The Death Bell (1954) Time's Deathbed 16 The Dead Shag 18 The Shell 20 Art and the Ravens 22 Taliesin in Gower 24 Ballad of the Rough Sea 27 from Cypress and Acacia (1959) Three Harps 30 Taliesin and the Spring of Vision 31 A Man with a Field 32 The Mare 33 Hunt's Bay 34 Trust Darkness 35 The Exacting Ghost 37 The Curlew 39 Angel and Man 39 The Tributary Seasons 41 Moonrise 44 Ode at the Spring Equinox 44 Good Friday 47 Great Nights Returning 49 from Affinities (1962) The Precision of the Wheel 50 The Interval 52 Rewards of the Fountain 52 Vine 53 Affinities 54 from The Childhood of Hölderlin 55 Bishopston Stream 60 Music of Colours: Dragonfoil and the Furnace of Colours 61 Five Poems of Magdalenian Darkness 64 Returning from Harvest 67 from Fidelities (1968) Two Sources of Life 69 Earth and Fire 69 The Sibyl 70 The Guest 71 The Razor Shell 72 Fisherman 72 Cornfields 73 Trees in a Town 74 Sonnet 75 Rebirth 76 The Snow Curlew 77 Means of Protection 77 Vultures 78 The Stayers 79 Strictness of Speech 79 Unity of the Stream 79 Fidelities 80 To a Shell 81 The Beaver 82 Triads 83 from Uncollected Poems (1969) Air 85 Second air 85 The Coin 86 from The Ballad of the Outer Dark (1979) A Dry Prophet 88 Rhadamanthus and the New Soul 89 from The Breaking of the Wave (1979) May You Love Leaves 91 I Do Not Ask a Gentle Way 91 Villanelle 92 Though to Please Man 93 Rarely Published and Unpublished Poems True Lovers 94 from Sonnets of Resurrection 95 Untitled 95 Parable Winkle 96 Attis 97 The Melodramatic 100 Aphorisms (Prose) 101 Notes 103 Selected Bibliography 113
'In Vernon's presence poetry seemed like a living stream, in which one had only to dip the vessel of one's devotion. He made it clear how one could, in fact, 'live by poetry'; it was a vocation, at once difficult as sainthood and easy as breathing.'
Philip Larkin |
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