Charles Tomlinson

Charles Tomlinson’s New Collected Poems gathers a lifetime’s work, from the 1950s to 2006. A poet deeply responsive to English landscape, grounded in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Tomlinson is also a writer of international renown, with wide-ranging interests in European and American poets, many of whom he has edited and translated. Collected Poems is an enriching journey across continents and literatures, friendships, collaborations and experiments, always with an eye keen for new places and possibilities. Tomlinson’s poetry is witty and luminous, marked by precise observation and language, alert to surfaces and depths, to the local and the universal. Cover image: Janus Figure by Charles Tomlinson. Cover design by StephenRaw.com

Emerging from the practice, art, and magic of translation, this essay collection concerns itself with the way certain fables of metamorphosis have captured the poetic imagination and how translation--literary metamorphosis--extends this process. The syntax and diction of the prose of John Ruskin, so important to the evolution of Proust's prose style, is offered as an example of the way visual experience can suggest certain methods of approach to the poet. Demonstrated is how, with a wealth of examples and close readings, poetry itself is a form of metamorphosis, raw materials being transformed and realized though literary expression and technique. In these essays a major poet reflects on the core and timeless elements of the poetic craft.

In his work as a physician, Williams had learnt the skill of objective observation which he applied to his poetry, examining, as he said, 'the particular to discover the universal'. Marked by a vernacular American speech and direct observation of the landscape and people of his native New Jersey, his poetry explores the 'raw merging of American pastoral and urban squalor. Emotionally restrained but rich in sensory experience, the poems were written according to the guiding concept: 'no ideas but in things' and those 'things', a red wheelbarrow, a group of trees, a river, convey the local and the particular with a vivid intensity.

The title poem of Charles Tomlinson's new volume describes the vineyards of an area of Italy which has been the subject of many poems since his earliest work. In the Cinque Terre vines are cultivated along the cliffs, within precarious sight of the sea beneath, their wine tasting sharply of its surroundings. In this way they have something in common with poetry itself. These are the poems of a traveller and explore the personal through the sense of place - Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and the West of England. 'I like something lucid,' writes Tomlinson, 'surrounded by somethingmysterious.' The book includes his moving elegy to another traveller, Bruce Chatwin. Tomlinson's geography is as large as Lawrence's, but his passionate restraint reminds us of Edward Thomas. In his translations he responds to those elements which reveal the distinctive, hardly transferable qualities of vision as it takes shape in languages very different from his own - Russian, French, Spanish.

In the tradition of Wallace Stevens, Charles Tomlinson's Selected Poems--encompassing his work from 1955 to 1997--records the logic of human perception, embodying aspects of both tragedy and possibility. Here is the long-awaited compendium of the work of one of England's contemporary masters and one of this century's great poets.