Book description
Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003, was one of the most prolific of
post-war poets and, as this Collected Poems reveals, one of the
finest. A friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in
the early 1950s, Redgrove was regarded by many as their equal, and his
work has been championed by a wide variety of writers - from Margaret
Drabble to Colin Wilson, Douglas Dunn to Seamus Heaney. Ted Hughes
once wrote warmly to Redgrove of 'how important you've been to me.
You've no idea how much - right from the first time we met.'
In this first Collected Poems, Neil Roberts has gathered
together the best poems from twenty-six volumes of verse - from The
Collector (1959) to the three books published posthumously. The
result is an unearthed treasure trove - poems that find new and
thrilling ways of celebrating the natural world and the human
condition, poems that dazzle with their visual imagination, poems that
show the huge range and depth of the poet's art. In Redgrove's poetry
there is a unique melding of the erotic, the terrifying, the playful,
the strange, and the strangely familiar; his originality and energy is
unparalleled in our time and his work was the work of a true visionary.
Peter Redgrove was born in 1932 and studied Natural Sciences at
Cambridge. He was also a novelist, playwright and co-author (with
Penelope Shuttle) of
The Wise Wound
, a revolutionary study of the human fertility cycle. Among his many
awards were the
Guardian
Fiction Prize, the Prix Italia and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
He died in 2003.
