New Collected Poems
Charles Tomlinson's "New Collected Poems" gathers a lifetime's work, from the 1950s to 2006. A poet deeply responsive to English landscape, grounded in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Tomlinson is also a writer of international renown, with wide-ranging interests in European and American poets, many of whom he has edited and translated. "Collected Poems" is an enriching journey across continents and literatures, friendships, collaborations and experiments, always with an eye keen for new places and possibilities. Tomlinson's poetry is witty and luminous, marked by precise observation and language, alert to surfaces and depths, to the local and the universal.
About the author
Charles Tomlinson, born in 1927, studied at Queens' College, Cambridge. He has published many books of poetry, and has translated selections from Russian, Spanish and Italian. He is also an artist. He taught at Bristol University, where he was appointed Emeritus Professor of English Poetry. He edited "The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation" (1980).
Reviews
"Tomlinson insists, and he has a right to insist, that he is as authentic a voice of modern Britain as Larkin is... Only in the great poets is content so intimately married to form" – Donald Davie
"Against the word as spectacle, Tomlinson opposes the concept – a very English one – of the world as event... He is fascinated – with his eyes open: a lucid fascination – by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things" – Octavio Paz
"He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life" – William Carlos Williams
"Against the word as spectacle, Tomlinson opposes the concept – a very English one – of the world as event... He is fascinated – with his eyes open: a lucid fascination – by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things" – Octavio Paz
"He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life" – William Carlos Williams