New and Collected Poems

Clive Wilmer’s New and Collected Poems begins with a fable about the conception, building and destruction of a walled city. It ends with a recent translation of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Hagia Sophia’, where the great Byzantine basilica is described in terms that recall the heavenly Jerusalem. In between is assembled the work of more than four decades, most of it dominated by a passion for building, a horror at destruction and a fascination with both. In Wilmer’s poetry, intense feeling and powerful images are united with a strong sense of order, which emerges in the intelligence and craftsmanship of the writing. Readers who think they know Clive Wilmer’s work may be surprised by what they find here. For this volume he has pruned his first two Carcanet collections, given two others in their entirety and added two new books. King Alfred’s Book & Other Poems, has been constructed from a fine group of poems in his 1995 Selected Poems and his small Worple Press collection, The Falls (2000). It centres on three epistolary poems to father figures, which – conversational in tone and formal in composition – make up a sequence here for the first time. Report from Nowhere & Other Poems is a collection of new work, mostly of a fragmentary character, compressed in form, austere in language and powerfully suggestive. To these collections have been added a handful of older poems not previously collected, two fine new occasional pieces and a generous selection of Wilmer’s translations from several languages, notably Hungarian.

About the Author :
Clive Wilmer was born in Harrogate in 1945, grew up in London and was educated at King's College, Cambridge. He now teaches English at Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, a Bye-Fellow of Fitzwilliam College and an Honorary Fellow of Anglia Ruskin University. He has published six Carcanet collections of poetry, as well as one volume with the Worple Press, The Falls (2000). Clive Wilmer is an authority on John Ruskin and his contemporaries, and has edited selections of Ruskin, William Morris and, for Carcanet's Fyfield series, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 2009 he was appointed Master of the Guild of St George, the charity founded by Ruskin in 1871. He has edited the essays of Thom Gunn and, in two Carcanet volumes, Donald Davie. With George Gomori, he has translated widely from modern Hungarian poetry, notably the works of Miklos Radnoti and Gyorgy Petri. In 2005 he was awarded the annual Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal for translation by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture. An occasional broadcaster, he fronted BBC Radio 3's Poet of the Month programmes and his interviews are published by Carcanet as Poets Talking.

Review :
'Forty years worth of the British poet's work are brought together in this collection that continues his pursuit of 'the mystery of things'. Alongside his own poetry are translations of mainly Hungarian works.' -- The Times, 9th February 2012