W. S. Graham - (Nyrb Poets) by W S Graham (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"An original collection of the best and most provocative work by Scottish poet W.S. Graham, the celebrated author of "Nightfishing" and Malcolm Mooney's Land. One of the most unusual and original poets of the last century, the Scottish poet W. S. Graham had a career that fell into two distinct parts. His early work was rapt and wild and incantatory--poems filled with linguistic fireworks that can be set beside those of his near contemporary Dylan Thomas--and it culminated in 1955 with The Nightfishing, a long poem of spectacular resonance and a tour de force of twentieth-century verse. After that Graham, who lived almost penniless with his wife in a tiny cottage near the coast of Cornwall, did not publish another book until the 1970s, at which point his work underwent an extraordinary flowering. This later work, beginning with the celebrated volume Malcolm Mooney's Land, is stark and quizzical and raw, a continual examination of thought and feeling that is also an ongoing exploration into the nature of poetic form, at once intimate and metaphysical, wry and elegiac. As Michael Hofmann makes clear in his introduction to his new selection of Graham's work, this late achievement makes Graham one of the great poetic voices of the English language"--<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><b>An original collection of the best and most provocative work by Scottish poet W.S. Graham, the celebrated author of Nightfishing and <i>Malcolm Mooney's Land. </i></b> <p/>"Does it disturb the language?" the Scottish poet W. S. Graham liked to ask about a poem. Graham's do--strangely, comically, beautifully. His career fell into two parts. The early work is rapt and wild and incantatory, and culminates in the tour de force of 1955, <i>The Nightfishing</i>. Fifteen years of silence were then followed by an extraordinary late flowering: Graham's poems became stark, quizzical, and unsettling, a continual teasing examination of thought and feeling that is also an ongoing investigation into the nature and power of poetry, work that is at once metaphysical and intimate, wry and elegiac. In these late poems, Graham emerges as one of the true originals of poetry in English.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>"His song is unique and his work is an inspiration....W.S. Graham drank and ate poetry every day of his life." --Harold Pinter <p/>"[W.S. Graham] is a poet of spectacular sophistication and originality and the supreme comic poet of our time." --Dennis O'Driscoll<br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>William Sydney Graham</b> (1918-1986) was born into a working-class family in Greenock, Scotland, where his father worked as a shipbuilder. Graham studied structural engineering in Glasgow and philosophy and literature at Newbattle Abbey College outside of Edinburgh before publishing his first collection of poetry, <i>Cage Without Grievance</i>, in 1942. In 1947, he received the Rockefeller Foundation's Atlantic Award for Literature and lectured at New York University for a year. Upon returning to the UK, he lived briefly in London, where he met T. S. Eliot, who accepted Graham's fourth collection, <i>The White Threshold</i>, for publication by Faber and Faber in 1949. Shortly after, Graham moved to Cornwall where, with Agnes "Nessie" Dunsmuir, whom he married in 1954, he lived in a small village and often in great poverty for the rest of his life. A fifth book of poems, <i>The Nightfishing</i>, appeared in 1955; a sixth, <i>Malcolm Mooney's Land</i>, in 1970. <i>Aimed at Nobody</i> was published posthumously by Faber and Faber in 1993. In 2018, the centenary of Graham's birth was marked by the unveiling of a memorial stone outside the Writers' Museum in Edinburgh. <p/><b>Michael Hofmann</b> is a German-born, British-educated poet and translator. He is the author of two books of essays and five books of poems, most recently <i>One Lark, One Horse</i>. Among his translations are plays by Bertolt Brecht and Patrick Süskind; the selected poems of Durs Grünbein and Gottfried Benn; and novels and stories by, among others, Franz Kafka; Peter Stamm; his father, Gert Hofmann; and fourteen books by Joseph Roth. He has translated several books for NYRB Classics, including Alfred Döblin's <i>Berlin Alexanderplatz</i>, Jakob Wassermann's <i>My Marriage</i>, and Gert Ledig's <i>Stalin Front</i> and edited <i>The Voyage That Never Ends</i>, an anthology of writing by Malcolm Lowry. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Florida.
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