Complete Poems - Softcover

Keith Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571276717 ISBN 13: 9780571276714

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2011

Synopsis

By the time he was killed in Normandy, aged only twenty-four, in June 1944, Keith Douglas had achieved a body of work that has earned him the reputation as the most brilliant and promising poet of the Second World War. He began writing when he was at school at Christ's Hospital, continued at Oxford, and then when he was in the army in England and in the Middle East. This is the definitive edition of his poems, edited by Desmond Graham, Douglas' biographer, and introduced by Ted Hughes.

About this title

About the Author:

Keith Douglas was born in 1920. At school and at Oxford he was both a prolific poet and a committed member of the Officers Training Corps. When the Second World War broke out, he enlisted immediately, and was posted to Palestine in 1941. When his tank regiment began fighting in El Alamein in 1942, Douglas was instructed to stay behind as a staff officer. But he made his own way to the battlefield, an experience which he recounted in his prose memoir Alamein to Zem Zem (first published in 1946). He later took part in the Normandy invasion on 6 June 1944, and was killed three days later. His Collected Poems came out in 1951.

Review:

'With this book we are in the presence of greatness. There is in his work a spaciousness, clarity and depth along with a wide variety of moods, themes, forms and rhythms. He can handle the delicate lyric as satisfyingly and as powerfully as a luminous vers libre. An important book of
undoubted mastery.'
The Daily Telegraph. Oct '94

`a body of work which has few rivals ... His poems are tense, sometimes breathless examinations of life at the very edge ... A powerful collection.'
Yorkshire Post

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0571276717
• ISBN 13: 9780571276714
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208