Simplify Me When I'm Dead: Poems Selected by Ted Hughes (Poet to Poet) - Hardcover

Douglas, Keith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571230385 ISBN 13: 9780571230389

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Synopsis

Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead.

As the processes of earth
strip off the colour and the skin
take the brown hair and blue eye

and leave me simpler than at birth
when hairless I came howling in
as the moon came in the cold sky.

―from "Simplify me when I'm dead"

By the time he was killed in Normandy in June 1944, at the age of only twenty-four, Keith Douglas had achieved a body of work that singled him out as the most brilliant and promising English poet of World War II. While his early poems deal with the wonder and pain of love, his later poems are focused on the misery and brutality of war and death. His body of work still conveys a rare immediacy and youthful power, marked―as Ted Hughes wrote in his introduction―by a "burning exploratory freshness of mind."

About this title

About the Author

KEITH DOUGLAS was also the author of a memoir of his experiences in World War II, Alamein to Zem Zem. He died in France in June 1944.

Review

“Each poem turns out to be an exercise [and] whatever they are, these 'exercises' display [the poet's] striving towards and, briefly, perfecting the qualities we value in him: the incisive, nimble glance, the uniquely tempered music, the simple, point-blank, bull's-eye statement, the tensile delicacy.” ―Ted Hughes, from his Introduction

“Ted did a beautiful [BBC radio] program on a marvelous young British poet, Keith Douglas, killed in the last war... Both of us mourn this poet immensely and feel he would have been like a lovely big brother to us.” ―from a letter Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother in June 1962

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0571230385
• ISBN 13: 9780571230389
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 64