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.

About the Author
GREY GOWRIE was born in Dublin in 1939 and educated in England and the USA. He taught English and American literature at Harvard and University College London and, in 1972, published his first poetry collection. He has been a company chairman, Chairman of the Arts Council of England and Provost of the Royal College of Art. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Reviews
'Grey Gowrie's poems - utterly free of any querulous or self-pitying note - touch the reader's own heart.' Dennis O'Driscoll, Times Literary Supplement



Book Information
ISBN 9781847772329
Author Grey Gowrie
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd