Kenneth Allott & Michael Murphy (Ed.)

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Biographical note:  Kenneth Allott (1912-1973) was a leading poet of the Thirties generation, publishing two collections of poetry: Poems (1938) and The Ventriloquist's Doll (1943). He was also the editor of the highly influential Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1950, rev. 1962). His Collected Poems has been out of print for a number of years, and this updated and revised new edition includes a significant number of poems either previously unpublished or not reprinted.

Biographical note:  Michael Murphy is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Allottments (2008), and his poems are included in The New Irish Poets. He is the author of a number of critical studies, including Writing Liverpool?:?Essays and Interviews (edited with Deryn Rees-Jones, 2007) and Proust and America (2007). He teaches at Nottingham Trent University and lives in Liverpool.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717293
ISBN:  9781844717293
Author:  Kenneth Allott
Title:  Collected Poems
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  06-Jun-09
Extent:  200pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  20 mm
Weight:  300 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 11.99
Price:  USD 18.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Kenneth Allott was born in Glamorgan and educated in Newcastle and Oxford. Widely regarded as one of the most promising poets of the late Thirties, he published just two volumes in his lifetime, Poems (Hogarth Press, 1938) and The Ventriloquist’s Doll (The Cresset Press, 1942). A posthumous Collected Poems (Secker & Warburg, 1975) gathered his earlier publications with a selection of unpublished work, edited by Miriam Allott and Roy Fuller. In Michael Murphy’s new annotated edition of the Collected Poems all Allot’s previously published work is combined with eighteen new poems, some of which have only recently come to light, the whole collection is introduced and annotated by Murphy and now represents the most complete picture of one of the UK’s most compelling war time poets.

Allott held a position at Liverpool University from 1948 until the time of his death in 1973. Allott’s wife succeeded him as Chair in Modern English, and in 1978 established the Kenneth Allott Lecture in Poetry. This Collected Poems is published in 2008, the thirtieth anniversary of the Lecture and the year in which Liverpool is designated the European Capital of Culture.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Note on the Text
POEMS (1938)
Men Walk Upright
Lament for a Cricket Eleven
Any Point on the Circumference
Sunday Excursion
The Statue
The Museum
Gnomic Verses
Lovers We Need
Offering
Request
Historical Grimace
Quicksilver
Pins and Needles
To Die Clean
Privacy
End of a Year
Never and Ever
Summer
Lullaby
Barometer
Azrael
Parable
Heroes and Hero Worship
Municipal Myth
The Plutocrats
Fête Champêtre
Exodus
Memento Mori
Prize for Good Conduct
Patch
The Watchman
The Professor
The Infinite Regress
Calenture
Aunt Sally Speaks
THE VENTRILOQUIST’S DOLL (1943)
Against the Clock
The Children
Love in the Suburbs
Love and Herbert Spencer
Christmas After Munich
Ode in Wartime
The Ventriloquist’s Doll
Wedding Anniversary
The Medium
Morning and Evening
Ragnarok
Two Ages
Feast of Saint Swithin
Steering Line
Speech from a Play
The Memory of Yeats
The Map
Blackout
People are Real
City Nocturne
Elegy
The Situation
Out of the Dream
UNCOLLECTED POEMS
Barking
Lake of Darkness
Patches on an Old Coat
Legend of a Good Woman
Lost Time
Poseuse
Farewell in the Afternoon
Week-end Guest
Dialogue of One
Hallow’een
Statement of Fact
Poem
Invocation
Signs
Valediction
Quicksilver
Cheshire Cat
Departure Platform
‘The Inconsequence of the Old Collecting Ferns …’
Moon in November
For Action: This Day
Late Augustan
Typed with Two Fingers
Fable
Song
‘To Be Old and Feel Nothing …’
Sunday 3 a.m.
Song
February
Before Breakfast
‘One Pain Cries in All Ages …’
‘Words Are Not Subtle Enough To Say How It Is …’
Lilies of the Colne Valley
‘He Could Not Sleep …’
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Lament for a Cricket Eleven
For S. T.

Beyond the edge of the sepia
Rises the weak photographer
With the moist moustaches and the made-up tie.
He looked with his mechanical eye,
And the upshot was that they had to die.

Portrait of the Eleven nineteen-o-five
To show when these missing persons were last alive.
Two sit in Threadneedle Street like gnomes.
One is a careless schoolmaster
Busy with carved desks, honour and lines.
He is eaten by a wicked cancer.
They have detectives to watch their homes.

From the camera hood he looks at the faces
Like the spectral pose of the praying mantis.
Watch for the dicky-bird. But, O my dear,
That bird will not migrate this year.
Oh for a parasol, oh for a fan
To hide my weak chin from the little man.

One climbs mountains in a storm of fear,
Begs to be unroped and left alone.
One went mad by a tape-machine.
One laughed for a fortnight and went to sea.
Like a sun one follows the jeunesse doree.

With his hand on the bulb he looks at them.
The smiles on their faces are upside down.
‘I’ll turn my head and spoil the plate.’
‘Thank you, gentlemen.’ Too late. Too late.
One greyhead was beaten in a prison riot.
He needs injections to keep him quiet.
Another was a handsome clergyman,
But mortification has long set in.
One keeps six dogs in an unlit cellar.
The last is a randy bachelor.

The photographer in the norfolk jacket
Sits upstairs in his darkroom attic.
His hand is expert at scissors and pin.
The shadows lengthen, the days draw in,
And the mice come out round the iron stove.
‘What I am doing, I am doing for love.
When shall I burn this negative
And hang the receiver up on grief?’

Review quote:  His amphibious intelligence, moving between creativity and scholarship, [makes me] think of him as an example of a man who proved how illusory was Yeats’ proffered choice between ‘perfection of the life or of the work.’

Seamus Heaney

Review quote:  A powerful apocalyptic … tone predominates, yet identifiable fragments of late-Thirties society can still be discerned, churning around in the echo-chamber of Allott’s imagination … at which moments the effect is something like MacNeice’s bagpipe music rescored for cellos and muffled drums.

Russell Davies
New Statesman

Review quote:  His poetry [is] original and personal in a way rare among young poets in any period but perhaps particularly in the 1930s. [F]ew poets in this century have written consistently with such wit and feeling, such natural elegance and style.

Julian Symons
Times Literary Supplement