Description
Book SynopsisPoems Written Abroad is the first-ever publication of the earliest collection of poetry by the famous poet, novelist, literary critic, translator, and radical, Sir Stephen Spender (1909-1995).
Trade ReviewPoems Written Aboard doesn't have the stupendous weight of his [Spender's] best-known poems or even the clever fun of his prose works, but it is delightful on several other levels. Clearly it's a notebook of someone who wants to be a poet, who must be a poet, and who is spending a summer on the continent, teaching himself the trade.... Christoph Irmscher's fourteen-page introduction, along with his bibliography and notes, tell you all you need to know about the manuscript's history and its details.
-- Felice Picano * The Gay & Lesbian Review *
Highly recommended.
* Choice *
Poems Written Abroad is a sort of prelude to the Spender story. It's a facsimile, with facing page transcription, of a poetic notebook that Spender kept for a couple of months in his late teens, while brushing up his French in Nantes and Lausanne before going up to Oxford. It is a very handsome production published by the Lilly Library of Indiana University. There are a few intimations of the poet he would become: Christoph Irmscher in his excellent introduction notices the way the images bump against one another 'like a badly made puzzle', and also 'the pervasive feeling that somewhere someone is having a more authentic experience'.
-- Seamus Perry * London Review of Books *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
A Note on the Text
He arrives at the town
Sonnet on Absence
He finds the town
The Chateau Garden
He does not like the youth
Stanzas
There are roses
She Holds a Rose
He is astounded by the oppressiveness
Fragment for a Possible Romance
Two sonnets of indignation
Two Sonnets
The Confession of the Monk
To a Poet
The boy who was called "the Nightingale"
The Original Bluebeard
Written after the Fête de Dieu
A Sonnet to be Beautifully Printed
After Ronsard
Tail-Piece
Ballad of Money
Clair de Lune
To W.E.P.
Consolation of Dust
Epitaph on a Poet
Abbreviations and Endnotes
Explanatory Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
