Body Language
Body language and the body of language – from the first words in the first garden to the last words of last night's lovers – are the entwined themes of Jon Stallworthy's new collection of poems, his first since 1995. The centrepiece is "Skyhorse", an ambitious poem for voices that finds in the White Horse on the Berkshire Downs an enduring presence through the turbulence of three millennia of English history. The book's second part is a candid, passionate sequence of elegies and love poems.
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.