"Third Day" is a selection from the poems Grey Gowrie has written between 1958 and the present day. At the centre of the book is the sequence "The Domino Hymn: Poems from Harefield", first published to great acclaim in 2005. This work draws on the best part of a year spent in hospital when the author, dying of a virus on the heart, was jolted back to life and writing by the surgical gift of a heart from a living donor. "Marches", poems of the post-operative years, follows, inspired by the country between England and Wales and the borderlands we all occupy between being and non-being. The book ends with "From Primrose Hill", a meditation on contemporary London.

About the Author
Grey Gowrie was born in Dublin in 1939. Educated and professionally engaged in England and the USA, he made his home in Ireland until 1983 when he moved to the Welsh Marches. He taught English and American literature at Harvard and University College London and in 1972, on publishing his first collection of poems, exchanged an academic career for business and public life. He has been a company chairman, a Cabinet minister, Chairman of the Arts Council of England and Provost of the Royal College of Art. He is married to the German journalist Adelheid von der Schulenburg and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Reviews
'The Domino Hymn' rages movingly against the dying of the light, covering heroic distances and charting epic struggles in the space of eighteen unflinching and atmospheric pages. Grey Gowrie's poems - utterly free from any querulous or self-pitying role - touch the reader's own heart as they give voice to the 'poor, bare, forked' individuals who are enmeshed in the tubes and wires of machine-age medicine.' - Times Literary Supplement.



Book Information
ISBN 9781857549669
Author Grey Gowrie
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd