Poetry

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. John Skelton (1460-1529) lived through one of England’s most turbulent and dangerous periods. A tutor to Prince Henry (later Henry VIII), Skelton enjoyed the monarch’s favour at court, despite his outspokenness. Throughout the sixteenth century many of Skelton’s poems were printed and reprinted, including “The Bouge of Court”, “Philip Sparrow”, “Colin Clout” and “The Tunning of Elinour Rumming”.

For the past four decades, Robert Bringhurst has been writing some of the most powerful poetry in English. Distinguished by engaged and passionate curiosity, a wide-ranging intelligence and true originality, his poetry has sometimes been mistaken as austere and opaque. In fact, his work engages in ideas about the human condition, myth, the natural world, language and philosophy, and is unusual for having both a pared simplicity and profound wisdom.

His watchword is clarity, and the elements he considers crucial to effective typography could just as easily be looked for – and found – in his poetry: ‘invite the reader into the text; reveal the tenor and meaning of the text; clarify the structure and the order of the text; link the text with other existing elements; induce a state of energetic repose, which is the ideal condition for reading.’

There is such relish for the tactile, physical nature of words, for spare, elemental imagery and for rhetorical weight – in the voice, and the sound of the voice – that each poem has a sense of gem-like purity. While Bringhurst’s work may not be the most fashionable poetry being written today, it is certainly amongst the most compelling in its truth, power and beauty.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.

Robert Lowell (1917-77) was born in Boston. Life Studies, published in 1959, was a watershed in American poetry, initiating an autobiographical project that became the dominating feature of his work and shaped poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the renowned and controversial author of many books of poetry, including For the Union Dead (1964) and Day by Day (1977). Faber published his Collected Poems in 2003.

Running Upon The Wires is Kate Tempest’s first book of free-standing poetry since the acclaimed Hold Your Own. In a beautifully varied series of formal poems, spoken songs, fragments, vignettes and ballads, Tempest charts the heartbreak at the end of one relationship and the joy at the beginning of a new love; but also tells us what happens in between, when the heart is pulled both ways at once.

Running Upon The Wires is, in a sense, a departure from her previous work, and unashamedly personal and intimate in its address – but will also confirm Tempest’s role as one of our most important poetic truth–tellers: it will be no surprise to readers to discover that she’s no less a direct and unflinching observer of matters of the heart than she is of social and political change. Running Upon The Wires is a heartbreaking, moving and joyous book about love, in its endings and in its beginnings.