Search results for ""Author Clive Wilmer""

Clive Wilmer's fourth collection of poems. The elegies, colloquys, meditations and passionate recollections learn from masters of modernism such as Pessoa and Pound, and are all the time informed by the prophetic voices of Morris and Ruskin.

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Clive Wilmer's New and Collected Poems begins with a fable about the conception, building and destruction of a walled city. It ends with a recent translation of Osip Mandelstam's 'Hagia Sophia', where the great Byzantine basilica is described in terms that recall the heavenly Jerusalem. In between is assembled the work of more than four decades, most of it dominated by a passion for building, a horror at destruction and a fascination with both. In Wilmer's poetry, intense feeling and powerful images are united with a strong sense of order, which emerges in the intelligence and craftsmanship of the writing. Readers who think they know Clive Wilmer's work may be surprised by what they find here. For this volume he has pruned his first two Carcanet collections, given two others in their entirety and added two new books. King Alfred's Book & Other Poems, has been constructed from a fine group of poems in his 1995 Selected Poems and his small Worple Press collection, The Falls (2000). It centres on three epistolary poems to father figures, which - conversational in tone and formal in composition - make up a sequence here for the first time. Report from Nowhere & Other Poems is a collection of new work, mostly of a fragmentary character, compressed in form, austere in language and powerfully suggestive. To these collections have been added a handful of older poems not previously collected, two fine new occasional pieces and a generous selection of Wilmer's translations from several languages, notably Hungarian.

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A collection of poems exploring the interdependence of earthly things and heavenly mystery.

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First and foremost an outcry against injustice and inhumanity, Unto this Last is also a closely argued assault on the science of political economy, which dominated the Victorian period. Ruskin was a profoundly conservative man who looked back to the Middle Ages as a Utopia, yet his ideas had a considerable influence on the British socialist movement. And in making his powerful moral and aesthetic case against the dangers of unhindered industrialization he was strangely prophetic. This volume shows the astounding range and depth of Ruskin's work, and in an illuminating introduction the editor reveals the consistency of Ruskin's philosophy and his adamant belief that questions of economics, art and science could not be separated from questions of morality. In Ruskin's words, 'There is no Wealth but Life.'

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Poet, pattern-designer, environmentalist and maker of fine books, William Morris (1834-96) was also a committed socialist and visionary writer, obsessively concerned with the struggle to achieve a perfect society on earth. News From Nowhere, one of the most significant English works on the theme of utopia, is the tale of William Guest, a Victorian who wakes one morning to find himself in the year 2102 and discovers a society that has changed beyond recognition into a pastoral paradise, in which all people live in blissful equality and contentment. A socialist masterpiece, News From Nowhere is a vision of a future free from capitalism, isolation and industrialisation. This volume also contains a wide selection of Morris's writings, lectures, journalism and letters, which expand upon the key themes of News From Nowhere.

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William Morris had a lifelong fascination with illuminated books. He collected thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts and became one of the foremost experts on the art of bookmaking and calligraphy. Aiming to resurrect a tradition that had fallen into abeyance with the invention of printing, he made eighteen illuminated books, using a variety of texts, during the course of his life. One of these, now held in the Bodleian Library, is a handmade edition of the Odes of Horace. The pages of this book, reproduced here in high-quality facsimile, are among the most intricate and ambitious that Morris ever created. Using a Renaissance italic style of calligraphy, he illuminated letters with delicate shades of gold and silver, and adorned them with floral decoration and miniature faces and figures. The openings to each of the four books of the Odes are stunning display pages on which Morris collaborated with the artists Edward Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray. The Roman poet Horace (65–8 BCE) wrote four books of lyric poetry in Latin which have subsequently been translated many times and have had an ongoing influence on Western literature. He combined descriptions of the everyday with the poetry of politics, patriotism, love and friendship, producing lines of beauty and wisdom which were very popular in Morris’s day and continue to appeal in the twenty-first century. This facsimile edition is presented in a blind embossed slipcase featuring a detail from one of Burne-Jones' paintings in the book with a companion volume containing an introduction to William Morris’s manuscript and an English translation of the Odes.

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