New Releases by Anthony Thwaite

"A new anthology of Anthony Thwaite''s poetry especially for readers in North America"--

This is the most authoritative and up to date survey of contemporary British poetry 1960-1995. It is the third version but second edition published by Longman of a successful survey that first appeared 30 years ago, and provides a succinct and accessible overview of British poets, movements and themes, ideal for English courses and the general reader alike.

This book is a record of my life in and reactions to Libya during the two periods I have lived there: first as a British army conscript in Tripolitania from June 1950 to July 1951, then as a university teacher in Cyrenaica from September 1965 to July 1967. That there is a connection between the two Ñ that my second stay was the result of my first Ñ quickly becomes apparent. To revisit a Land of Lost Content is supposed to be a mistake, and I dare say it generally is. One thinks of those public school Captains of Games who, on leaving university, tunnel back as quickly as possible into the golden world of youth by returning to those same public schools as masters, and spend the rest of their lives training up new Captains of Games. But my return to Libya was different, partly because at thirty-five I was quite aware of the illusions of twenty, and partly because I came not to Tripolitania, the western province of the country, but to Cyrenaica in the east, which I had never seen before. And in Benghazi I settled down with my family and became part of a Libyan institution, rather than being a single soldier forced by circumstance on to the periphery of Libyan life. No one has yet written a wholly satisfactory book about Libya: the journals of nineteenth-century and later desert travellers, war memoirs, archaeological monographs, economic and sociological surveys, accounts such as Gwyn WilliamsÕs Green Mountain and Agnes Newton KeithÕs Children of Allah Ñ many of these give attractive and interesting glimpses but all are in some way narrow and partial. I canÕt suppose that my own account is any less so, but I hope that at any rate it gives some sense of the feel of this huge and still little-known country, so close to Europe and yet so remote. If there are more ruins than oil-rigs in the book, that is a matter of my own antiquarian tastes; if there seem to be more ruins than people, I have little to fall back on but that remark of Rose MacaulayÕs that she often found ruins more interesting than people. Ignorance dictates my sub-title: this book is an experience, a personal one, and does not set out to be authoritative and definitive.

Now that he is eighty-four, Anthony Thwaite says that Going Out is likely to be the last book of poems he publishes in his lifetime, and that the title is apt. But the words are wistful, even playful, and that is true of some of the book''s contents. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends (especially the poet Peter Porter), and draw on memories, hard-won faith, self-questioning. As Michael Frayn has put it, Thwaite ''writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things, the complexity and unceasingness of the world, the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present - and the heroic persistence of our efforts to fix some trace of all this.'' -- from back cover.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was the best-loved poet of his generation, and the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen''s Gold Medal for Poetry, and the W H Smith Award. In Larkin at Sixty, a tribute to him on his sixtieth birthday, twenty writers came together to celebrate the man and the poet with specially written pieces. Some of them are reminiscences, some look at aspects of his professional life as librarian, some consider his taste as it revealed itself in his writings on jazz and in his editing of the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. The relationship between his novels and his poems is examined, and several essays explore the poems themselves. Three poets contribute hitherto unpublished poems. Together, all these illuminate with affection and insight the work, the man behind the work, and the appeal of both. The editor, Anthony Thwaite, edited Larkin''s Collected Poems, Selected Letters and Further Requirements, and became one of Larkin''s chosen literary executors

This is an impressive gathering of Thwaite''s poems written in the period since his Collected Poems (2007) and published in honor of his 80th birthday. Some of these new poems have been published in the Guardian, London Review of Books, Poetry Review, Spectator, and Times Literary Supplement; all are uncollected.

Poetry remains a living part of the culture of Japan today. The clichés of everyday speech are often to be traced to famous ancient poems, and the traditional forms of poetry are widely known and loved. The congenial attitude comes from a poetical history of about a millennium and a half. This classic collection of verse therefore contains poetry from the earliest, primitive period, through the Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Muromachi and Edo periods, ending with modern poetry from 1868 onwards, including the rising poets Tamura Ryuichi and Tanikawa Shuntaro.

Anthony Thwaite''s Collected Poems, published as he reaches seventy-seven, give readers an opportunity to see gathered together all the poems he wants to preserve from the sixteen collections he has published since his debut in the Fantasy Poets series in 1953. Although his roots are partly in the Movement, he has developed a distinctive style - once described as ''cunningly modulated eloquence'' - and a range of concerns which have defined his poetry from the beginning: memory, history, archaeology, travel (he has lived in Japan and Libya, writing of them with subtlety and affection), the intricacies of relationships, and now the frustrations of age. Through his own voice and those he has adopted (most memorably in ''The Letters of Synesius'' and Victorian Voices), he has made a significant contribution to the literature of the last half-century, elegantly and perceptively setting the curiosities of the present against the layers of the past.

R. S. Thomas (1913- 2000) was born in Cardiff. He studied classics, then theology and, after ordination, served six rural Welsh parishes for most of his life. His first book of poems was published in 1946. He won the Queen''s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1964 and published regularly, Collected Poems 1945-90 marking his eightieth birthday.

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, MEMOIRS, LETTERS / POETRY

Features poems, written over a period of forty years. This title includes poems of a traveller and explorer - of the contemporary world and of the past - who brings back tales which tell us more each time we read them.

Poetry by British poet and editor Anthony Thwaite.

Poems.

En kort beskrivelse med data, fotografi og vigtigste værker over en række engelske digtere fra det 20. århundrede , omfattende: Ancestors, "The Movement" and after (1954-ca.1970), Exiles, Regions, Varieties of woman, Wits, Performance, Light and serious, From outside in, Canon-makers, Sexual relations, Political fables, Versatilities.