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Life, Letters and Criticism‘I
feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not
directed to him, does not have to open and read.' Rainer Maria Rilke
from Letters to a Young Poet |
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Sutherland, John £25.00 <convert> 
Seven
years after Stephen Spender's death, John Sutherland offers the authorised life
of this brilliant, but famously enigmatic, man. Sutherland's account ranges from
the depiction of Spender's cosmopolitan family (and the dominant influence of
his archetypal Victorian father) via Oxford, to the breakaway years in 1930s Weimar
Germany, where his comrades in liberated exile were W.H. Auden and Christopher
Isherwood. We follow him through the war as Britain's most famous fireman, to
the postwar years of international celebrity - a celebrity which provoked some
animosity; Spender's reputation is among the most unfairly contested of its time
but of all the great writers of the 1930s he lived longest and lived most fully.
Stephen Spender was, and still is, a controversial figure. One thing is, however,
irrefutable. Anyone who was anyone, in literary or cultural terms, crossed his
path: the pageant of his friends, acquaintances (and, sometimes, antagonists)
includes Isaiah Berlin, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond
Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Cyril Connolly.
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Powell, Neil £12.50 <convert>
George Crabbe is today most widely
known as the author of Peter Grimes, from "The Borough" (1810), one of a sequence
of verse-narrative collections. This book includes a reinterpretation of some
of his poetry and provides a portrait of an unexpectedly attractive and eccentric
character. | | | Ackroyd, Peter £12.99 <convert>
Geoffrey Chaucer, who died in 1400, enjoyed an eventful life. He served
with the Duke of Clarence and with Edward III, and in 1359 was taken prisoner
in France and ransomed. Through his wife, Philippa, he gained the patronage of
John of Gaunt, which helped him carve out a career at Court. His posts included
Controller of Customs at the Port of London, Knight of the Shire for Kent, and
King's Forester. He went on numerous adventurous diplomatic missions to France
and Italy. He began to write in the 1360s, and is now known as the father of English
poetry. His Troilus and Cressida is the first example of Modern English literature,
and his masterpiece, Canterbury Tales,the forerunner of the English novel, dominated
the last part of his life.
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Gerstein, Emma £25.00 <convert>
This title, part biography and part
autobiography, alters our view of Russia's two greatest 20th-century poets, providing
memorable glimpses of numerous other figures, and offers several vignettes of
Boris Pasternak. | | |
Kermode, Frank £12.99 <convert>
Shakespeare
made his contribution to British and world culture in the midst of Elizabeth's
great reign. Here, the circumstances of each play's composition are acutely described,
and set within a portrait of Shakespeare's England - its early capitalism, its
court, and its bursting population. | | Salome, Lou Andrea £9.95 <convert>
You Alone Are Real to Me, translated by Angela van Lippe,
presents for the first time in English Lou Andreas-Salomé's memoir of the great
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke's lifelong friend, travelling companion
and muse, Salomé vividly recalls their meetings and travels, the dam-bursts of
creativity in which Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies,
and their long correspondence in which she kept Rilke from utter despair.
Written
in 1927, a year after Rilke's death, You Alone Are Real to Me is the work of a
fascinatingly multi-faceted woman, a popular European novelist, a friend to Nietzsche
and Freud, a noted writer on psychoanalysis: above all, a woman capable of understanding
the aspirations and spirit of her 'Old Rainer'.
'You Alone Are Real to
Me is eloquent and superbly nuanced. Von der Lippe's introduction and afterword
are critically splendid.' Harold Bloom | | Neruda, Pablo £10.99 <convert>
Neruda's memoirs begin with his childhood spent in the south of Chile and
retrace his student days in Santiago. He recalls his sojourn as Chilean consul
in Burma, Ceylon and Java, and relives the Spanish Civil War and the murder of
Garcia Lorca, an event that turned him into a communist and a poet.
'The
greatest poet of the twentieth century - in any language.' Gabriel Garcia Marquez
'What Neruda has done is to keep bursting at the seams… swallowing the
world whole and regurgitating it in an endless stream that he seems to leave behind
him like footprints.' Alastair Reed | |
Forthcoming
poetry books
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Stephen Spender
George Crabb
Chaucer
Moscow Memoirs
The Age of Shakespeare
You Are Alone Are Real to Me
Memoirs