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| When Robert Nye’s first poems were published, G.S. Fraser
declared in the Times Literary Supplement: “Here is a
proper poet, though it is hard to see how the larger literary
public (greedy for flattery of their own concerns) could be
brought to recognize that. But other proper poets – how
many of them are left? – will recognize one of themselves.” |
| Since then Nye has become known to a large public for his
novels, especially Falstaff (1976) winner of the Hawthornden
Prize and The Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Late Mr Shakespeare
(1998). But his true vocation has always been poetry, and it
is as a poet that he is best known to his fellow poets. “Nye
is the inheritor of a poetic tradition that runs from Donne
and Ralegh to Edward Thomas and Robert Graves,” wrote
James Aitchison in 1990, while the critic Gabriel Josipovici
has described him as “one of the most interesting poets
writing today, with a voice unlike that of any of his contemporaries.” |
| This book contains all the poems Nye has written since his
Collected Poems of 1995, together with his own selection from
that volume. An introduction, telling the story of his poetic
beginnings, affirms Nye’s unfashionable belief in inspiration,
as well as defining that quality of unforced truth which distinguishes
the best of his work: “I have spent my life trying to
write poems, but the poems gathered here came mostly when I
was not.” |
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