William Plomer: Selected Poems (Memento) - Hardcover

Plomer, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0993505635 ISBN 13: 9780993505638

Publisher: Little Island Press, 2017

Synopsis

He was E. M Forster’s ‘favorite contemporary poet’. W. H Auden extolled his ‘first-class visual imagination’. Stephen Spender considered his output ‘among the best English poems written in the present century’. Yet for most readers, William Plomer (1903—1973) is now a faintly-remembered name. Born in Pietersburg, South Africa, Plomer settled in London in 1929, where he went on to occupy a central position in English letters. By the time of his death he had published ten books of poetry. In a voice impersonal and strange, Plomer’s best poems reveal a mind that delights in the ‘sensory, pictorial and plastic’ (though not, as he thought, at the expense of the metaphysical).

About this title

From the Author

Neilson MacKay is a doctoral candidate at the University of Durham and visiting fellow at Harvard University. Currently completing a thesis on poetry in the “Little Magazines” of the interwar years, Nielson's writing and criticism has appeared in The New Criterion, amongst others. William Plomer, (born Dec. 10, 1903, Transvaal, S.Af.—died Sept. 21, 1973, Lewes, East Sussex, Eng.) South African-born British man of letters, whose writing covered many genres: poetry, novels, short stories, memoirs, and even opera librettos.

Review

"A welcome rescue operation on the unjustly forgotten William Plomer, novelist, librettist, and (above all) poet of decorous wistfulness and cunning, understated mastery." —Roger Kimball, Publisher and Editor, The New Criterion; publisher, Encounter Books

"This Selected Poems is a welcome sign that Plomer the poet is still with us . . . [whose] cool, precise and impersonal style may put off modern readers with a taste for confessional candour and soul-searching. He was no tub-thumper but favoured (as he wrote to Stephen Spender) 'the sensory, pictorial and plastic rather than the philosophical, metaphysical or political.'" —David Collard, Times Literary Supplement

Edition details

• Publisher: Little Island Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0993505635
• ISBN 13: 9780993505638
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 128
• Editor: MacKay Neilson