Description
Book SynopsisA charming new collection of previously unpublished and uncollected poems by Sir John Betjeman.John Betjeman's unforgettable poems on landscape and suburbia, desire and death, faith and doubt, helped to establish him as the beloved voice of a nation. Yet the ten books of poetry he published individually, later assembled in the
Collected Poems, were an incomplete representation of his poetic oeuvre. Many poems published in journals or magazines were excluded from Betjeman's books by him or his editors and a substantial number of finished poems were never printed at all, remaining unknown to readers until now.In this exquisite new edition of Betjeman's verse editor Kevin Gardner promises new treasures for Betj's' admirers the world over. Betjeman wrote many of these poems in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he was still developing his unique poetic voice. They reveal a young poet experimenting with both Modernism and post-Romanticism, yet influenced by Shelley and Pope
Trade ReviewKevin J Gardner has dug up 80 or so lost or neglected poems from the archives, which show the full range of Betjeman’s oeuvre over half a century. * The Sunday Times *
A marvellous gathering of hitherto hidden Betjeman, varied and surprising. -- Anthony Thwaite, poet and editor of Philip Larkin’s 'Collected Poems'
The Betjeman music, but satire, fear and dissonance are its vivid companions. -- Peter Scupham, poet
Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Notes HARVEST BELLS: NEW AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS A.D. 1980 Ye Olde Cottage (Quite Near a Town) The Song of a Cold Wind A Sentimental Poem Sweets and Cake Dentist's Dining Room Sezincote Pastoral Incident A Squib on Norman Cameron Blisland, Bodmin Home Thoughts from Exile Work Popular Song Nine O'Clock Emily Wren The Tamarisks Sonnet Wisteria Branches A Poem by My Old Bear Archibald Harvest Bells Country Silence Channel Crossing Eighteenth-Century Pint Lerici 1930 Evangelistic Hymn Sudden Conversion Zion The Outer Suburbs St Aloysius Church, Oxford Charterhouse School Song London Spreading Satires of Circumstance The Heartless Heart's Ease: A Lament by Tom Moore The Most Popular Girl in School The Electrification of Lambourne End Edgware The Wykehamist at Home Tea with the Poets A Poet's Prayer On Miss E. Badger, 9 Beverley Gardens, Wembley Park, Middlesex, Who Sat Opposite to Me on the GWR, Ascension Day 1939 Big Business Chestnut Hair Clifton 1940 Order Reigns in Warsaw Prologue Specially Written for the 70th Anniversary Gaiety Theatre, Dublin To Uffington Ringers Rosemary Hall The Tailwaggers' Friend Margate, 1946 A Memory of 1940 Aberdeen In Overcliffe October Bells The Corporation Architect The Weary Journalist The Death of the University Reader of Spanish A Curate for Great Kirkby Clay and Spirit Not Necessarily Leeds The St Paul's Appeal The Divine Society Village Wedding John Edward Bowle 1962 Prologue Spoken by Peggy Ashcroft at the Opening of Peggy Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, 5 November 1962 A Good Investment St Mary's Chapel of Ease The Finest Work in England: I.K. Brunel La Cometa Moraira A Lament for Middlesex Castle Howard Lines Read at the Wing Airport Resistance Movement Protest Meeting, June 1970 Sonnet Revenge St Mary-le-Strand My Landlady's Dog Guyhirn Chapel of Ease St Bartholomew's Hospital Who Took Away... Lines on the Unmasking of the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures Dawlish
Notes on the poems Appendix A: A Portuguese Translation Appendix B: A Possible Attribution
