An Andrew Crozier Reader

Andrew Crozier (1943-2008) was a poet, and an energiser of poetry. A champion of work excluded from the familiar canon, he brought to the English literary landscape of the 1960s and 70s an engagement with the energies of American poetry. As a publisher and critic he helped to create a space for new voices within English poetry: for George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Roy Fisher, J.H. Prynne. His own poetry is meticulous in its attention to language, exhilarating in its inventiveness and force. Crozier wrote that, for him, ‘becoming a poet had to do with finding a mode for making sense of ... being alive’, and his writing is alive with the possibilities of language. Ian Brinton, editor of The Use of English until 2011 and author of Contemporary Poetry Since 1990, has brought together a comprehensive selection of Crozier’s poetry and prose, much of it previously out of print or scattered in small press publications. Biographical and critical notes and a detailed bibliography complete this landmark edition of one of the essential figures in modern poetry.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction A Note on the Text I Cambridge and New York Train Rides 1Name & Nature 2Drill Poem 3Getting Ready To Come Back Here 4[‘Your smell’] 5[‘You turn’] 6Early Morning, Night Sorting Shift 7[‘Young men from old poets should learn’] 8The Lunatic 9[‘All across this country standing’] 10[‘Daily, and’] A note on the train, January 1966 Loved Litter of Time Spent The Americans Numbers Are Adjectives: Counting Cats A Judy The Elders What Spokes, and to What Hub? A Spring Song On Romney Marsh Second Song in Spring An Invocation: To Snow For The Daffodil on my Table The City Rises The Evening’s Occupation The Joke Poem Some Other Occasion: Joan’s The American Valentine Privy Business Thor’s Fishing Trip There are Names A Poem of Men The Rainbow With Her New Lover How Does It Go? II Essex and Keele Walking on Grass FROM THE ROOT At Least I’ve A Roof Over My Head Three Night Pieces Ways With Dice Towards Marriage The Kitchen Sweet Words on Honeyed Lips Nowhere to Fly To A Day, a Garden, Stay Awake to Dream The Harp Now Evening, Last Night and Tonight A Small Orchard Stay On and What Is Lost Sprung from the Root Tired, Dies Out of the Deep Follow, Shadow For Amity Seaside Fragments Two Poems Out of Slumber WALKING ON GRASS Curtain Love Poem Fan Heater In Daylight Alarm Stepping, into her Dream Natural History Mirror Mirror The Interference Yellow A Set of Nashe Diary To John James Walking on Grass Let’s Go Faster The Source III Printed Circuit to The Veil Poem Printed Circuit The Author & His Work Bankruptcy Conversely Moorland Glory, or Swann’s Vestas Coup de Main Scintillating Grow Your Own Rosebud The Corsaire Charming Dodo You’re Not Dead The Syntactic Revolution I Remember You/You’re Driving Me Crazy Falling in Love With You (Take Two) The Very Thought of You The Song is You For You And I Can’t Wait All Day For You Neglected Information North British Engine An Island on Loch Lomond Hotel Door St. Fallion Looe in Devonshire Looe Aberfoyle Langley Court in Kent Kinnaird Table Linlithgow and Stirlingshire Hounds XXXXXXXXXXXXX Bourne End At Tummell on the Loch On the Loch Leaving for the Motor on the Loch At the Oil Works The Zoo in Cairo The Zoo in Cairo (II) Grand Hotel Helouan The Dartmoor Fox Hounds The Dartmoor Fox Hounds (II) The Dartmoor Bexhill or Anywhere Else Oban Bay The Veil Poem 0(left unfinished 1[‘In the dark there is a fretwork’] 2[‘What hides in darkness and what truths’] 3[‘In nature everything, we suppose, connects up’] 4[‘Bend back the edges and pull what you see’] 5[‘The coals in the stove glow red’] 6[‘I stand before the last arch, which makes’] 7[‘The wind blows around the house’] 8[‘The electric light over the gateway’] 9[‘What I know has day by day’] Coda for the Time Being The Life Class IV Pleats to Were There Pleats Duets High Zero Were There Person to Person Sussex Express Sundials Local Colour Loopy Dupes Utamaro Variations As Though After John Brett Cardiff Docks, After Sickert Forsythia The End of a Row of Conjectural Units V All Where Each Is Pretty Head FIVE POEMS Winter Intimacies 1978–1982 Upright Captions Border with Cherubs A New Compilation of Existence Humiliation in its Disguises HALF ARTIFICE Clouds and Windows Oh, That Evaporation of a Dream Distant Horizons Survival Kit Still Life Marble Set White Launch Door Contre Jour Light Release Fifth Variation Pilot Flame Driftwood and Seacoal (Family Portrait) VI On Objectivism The Heifer: after Carl Rakosi Inaugural and Valedictory: The Early Poetry of George Oppen VII On British Poetry Signs of Identity: Roy Fisher’s A Furnace Review of J.F. Hendry’s A World Alien VIII ‘Free Running Bitch’ Free Running Bitch Star Ground Blank Misgivings XI Resting on Laurels Resting on Laurels Selected Bibliography Index of Poem Titles Index of Poem First Lines Index of Names ILLUSTRATIONS Drawing of Andrew Crozier by Fielding Dawson, New York 1965 Cover for Peter Riley and Andrew Crozier, Romney Marsh (1967), by Kathleen Crozier Cover for Printed Circuit (1974), by Ian Tyson Illustration for Printed Circuit (1974), by Ian Tyson Cover for Neglected Information (1972), by Philip Crozier Postcards sent from Jeff Morsman to Andrew Crozier, 1971 Cover for Pleats (1975), by Michael Simpson Cover for High Zero (1978), by Ian Potts Cover for Were There (1978), by Ian Potts Letter from Carl Rakosi to Andrew Crozier, 7 June 1965 Carl Rakosi and Andrew Crozier, Cambridge 1997. Photograph by Jean Crozier

About the Author :
Andrew Crozier was born in 1943 and was educated at Dulwich College and Christ’s College, Cambridge. In 1964, the same year in which he founded the Ferry Press, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the State University of New York, Buffalo, where he was taught by Charles Olson and made contact with the almost-forgotten poet Carl Rakosi, prompting Rakosi’s return to writing. In 1998, Crozier published an edition of Rakosi’s early poems. Crozier’s first collection, Loved Litter of Time Spent (1967), was published while he was in the United States. On his return to England, he studied for a PhD at the University of Essex under Donald Davie, before taking up a post at the University of Sussex in 1973, where he remained until his retirement as Professor of English in 2005. He founded two journals, The English Intelligencer and the Wivenhoe Park Review, later the Park Review, while continuing to publish his own and others’ poetry in Ferry Press editions. He wrote extensive literary criticism and in 1987 co-edited the influential anthology A Various Art, published by Carcanet Press. His collected poems were published in 1985 with the title All Where Each Is (Allardyce, Barnett). Andrew Crozier died in 2008. Ian Brinton studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before going on to a career in English teaching. He was Head of English at Leeds Grammar School, Sevenoaks School and Dulwich College before retiring in 2009. He was an editor of The Use of English from 2003 to 2011. Ian Brinton has written books on Dickens and Emily Bronte, and is the author of Contemporary Poetry Since 1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and the editor of A Manner of Utterance: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne (Shearsman, 2009). After nearly forty years of school-teaching Ian Brinton now writes full-time. His recent publications include translations from the French of Yves Bonnefoy and Francis Ponge; a new chapbook of translations from the French of Philippe Jaccottet is to appear from Oystercatcher Press. As a literary critic he has edited three books of the work of Andrew Crozier, and two books about the poet J.H. Prynne including For the Future, a festschrift for the poet’s eightieth birthday. Infinite Riches, a history of poets from Dulwich College since 1950, was published recently and his edition of the Selected Poems & Prose of John Riley is due to appear in November. He co-edits Tears in the Fence and SNOW and is on the committee setting up the new archive of Contemporary Poetry at Cambridge University Library.