First Time in Japan

Imagine a character of our time whose affinities are with the Silver Poets of Ancient Rome. A person at the pivot of middle age; cosmopolitan, yet jaundiced - a hedonist with greying temples and expanding belly...

This is the persona whose voice permeates `First Time in Japan', enabling Anthony Howell to speak without calculating the soundness of the view expressed. As always his poems are distilled from irony, wit and an intensity of poetic craft, creating another unsettling fusion of modernism and bravura tradition.

Anthony Howell was born in London in April 1945 and was educated at Leighton Park, a Quaker school in Berkshire. By 1966 he was dancing with the Royal Ballet. He left ballet shortly after, however, in order to concentrate on his writing. In 1973 he was a member of the International Writing Program in Iowa. In 1974 he founded The Theatre of Mistakes - a company dedicated to poetic drama - which has performed at the Cambridge Poetry Festival and in art galleries and theatres in Europe and America.