Poems of London (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593320204 ISBN 13: 9780593320204

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2021

Synopsis

A beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets anthology of poems inspired by this storied city, from its teeming medieval streets to the multicultural metropolis it is today

Poems of London covers a wide range of time and includes not only the pantheon of classic English poets, from Shakespeare to Wordsworth to T. S. Eliot, but also tributes by notable visitors from all over, from Arthur Rimbaud to Samuel Beckett to Sylvia Plath, and contributions by an array of immigrants or the children of immigrants, including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Patience Agbabi, and recent Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo. All the famous sights of London, from the Thames to the Tower, are touched on in this vibrant collection, and denizens of its busy streets ranging from princes to pubgoers to pickpockets wander through these pages. The result is an enthralling portrait of an endlessly varied and fascinating place.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

About this title

About the Author

CHRISTOPHER REID is the author of many books of poems, including A Scattering (winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award) and The Song of Lunch (both 2009). From 1991 to 1999 he was Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber, where he worked with Ted Hughes on such books as Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters, and later he edited Letters of Ted Hughes (2007). He is now a freelance writer and lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FOREWORD
 
Whether you live in London, as I have done for almost fifty years, or are on a brief visit, you cannot help being reminded of both the geographical extent and the historical depth of the city. How do you make sense of it all?
 
For the purposes of this anthology – a pocketsize book about a vast and teeming place – I have begun at the centre. Think of the River Thames as the artery that from earliest days has allowed London’s heart, the City of London, to beat. There and in Westminster is where you will find the greatest concentration of the traces of history, some well-preserved and plain to see, others more hidden. But there is no need to rely just on old buildings and monuments: poets from the Early Modern period onward have been among the busiest and liveliest chroniclers, whether reporting events or imagining them, celebrating metropolitan life or deploring it; and while the evidence they offer is necessarily partial, it adds up to a considerable body of witness.
 
William Blake stands on a different plane from his fellows in having attempted, singlehanded, something more ambitious: the articulation, in his prophetic books Milton and Jerusalem, of a comprehensive mythology of London. Blake may still be thought eccentric, as he was in his own day, but his is the spirit that I have come to regard as presiding over my choice of poems, extracts from poems, song lyrics, topical doggerel and poetically charged prose. Embracing not only the city centre, but also the districts and boroughs that sprawl around and away from it, Blake’s vision strikes me as a vigorous assertion of eccentricity as the most reliable means of seeing the place as it really is.
 
So the following pages set out, in their own manner, to do justice to the full range between history and mythology, objective reality and the private feelings of the individual. The past – some of it proud, much disgraceful – looms large; but London’s habit of growing and changing needs to be considered as well. With this in mind, I have placed in my final section a handful of poems addressing the experiences of immigrants who have become citizens. Regrettably, it has not been possible to include a section about London as the revitalizing new intake of the future will know it.
 
I should like to thank Charles Boyle, Eleanor Bron, Nancy Campbell, Neil Corcoran, Tom Deveson, Cliff Forshaw, Vivi Lachs, Alan Leith, Lord Lisvane and Gwyneth Powell for their advice and assistance with
this book.
 
Christopher Reid

Edition details

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593320204
• ISBN 13: 9780593320204
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Reid Christopher