Anthony Thwaite's new collection is both moving and funny, elegiac and playful. The personal poems span a life-time as Thwaite relives moments of childhood, or reassesses his role as son to a dying mother, or gets told how to behave by his grandson. Elsewhere he laments his old cat and conjures up a Sumerian Anthology of poets. The principal concern of the collection is what lasts and what vanishes: dreams, memories, people and objects. In this quest, he takes us with him to Italy, Siberia and Syria, and is haunted by the mystery of places 'where there are no words'. It is, however, the very craft of his finely wrought poetry and its sudden moments of sheer beauty which make palpable for the reader 'the shape of the invisible soul'.

About the Author
Anthony Thwaite was born in 1930. He spent his childhood in Yorkshire, the USA (1940-44) and school in 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 and Selected Letters. He is a regular reviewer for the Guardian and other journals. In 1990 he was made an OBE for services to poetry.

Reviews
'[The poems] knit together, almost as a mosaic, and the book has a consistent tone which is elegiac but also delightfully physical.' Peter Porter'He gets even better as he grows older.' P. J. Kavanagh



Book Information
ISBN 9781900564588
Author Anthony Thwaite
Format Paperback
Page Count 64
Imprint Enitharmon Press
Publisher Enitharmon Press