Tomlinson's poems concern the English countryside, travel, foreign cities, walks and conversations with fellow writers and friends. This selection of poems, compiled by the author from his fourteen books written since 1955, also includes two new poems written in this, his seventieth year.
A collection of poems that gathers the poet's lifetime's work, from the 1950s to 2006.
Opening with Professor Tomlinson's superbly clear and helpful introduction this selection reflects the most up-to-date Williams scholarship. In addition to including many more pieces, Tomlinson has organized the whole in chronological order.It isn't what he [the poet] says that counts as a work of art," Williams maintained, "it's what he makes, with such intensity of purpose that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.
Our vast and often neglected literature of poetic translation is represented in this anthology by some 600 poems or extracts. The choice encompasses many languages, including the Hebrew of the Bible, the Greek of Homer, the Latin of Virgil and Ovid, Persian, French, German, Russian, Italian, Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Irish, and the American Indian, all rendered into English.