Rounding the Horn
Collected Poems
Jon Stallworthy, the son and grandson of New Zealanders, rounded the Horn en route to his birth in London. He began writing poems at seven, during – and about – the Second World War. The conflict and his colonial inheritance gave him a sense of "the round earth's imagined corners" and the presence of the past which informs such of his best-known work as "No Ordinary Sunday", "A Letter from Berlin" and "The Almond Tree".
His first book established him as a poet with "a gift few poets possess, and which all poets wish for – the ability to strike out a memorable and epigrammatic line which is at once simple and deeply disturbing" (Critical Quarterly). That has remained the hallmark of his subsequent books which continue to command a place in all the major anthologies. Now, to coincide with the publication of a memoir, Singing School (John Murray), Stallworthy has made a comprehensive selection of what Poetry Review described as "snatches of radio traffic from this century's storms, true stories, and some of the storytelling inspired".
His first book established him as a poet with "a gift few poets possess, and which all poets wish for – the ability to strike out a memorable and epigrammatic line which is at once simple and deeply disturbing" (Critical Quarterly). That has remained the hallmark of his subsequent books which continue to command a place in all the major anthologies. Now, to coincide with the publication of a memoir, Singing School (John Murray), Stallworthy has made a comprehensive selection of what Poetry Review described as "snatches of radio traffic from this century's storms, true stories, and some of the storytelling inspired".
About the author
Jon Stallworthy, born in 1935, was educated at Rugby, in the Royal West African Frontier Force, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize of Poetry. A Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford. He has published seven books of poetry. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He recently published a life of Louis MacNeice. He has edited Owen's "Complete Poems and Fragments", Henry Reed's "Collected Poems", and several anthologies.