Griffiths has one of the finest ears – for song, for varieties and cadences of speech – of any poet writing today. His compacted lyrics flash with intelligence and humour. They are shaped by anger, empathy and childish delight. But they are also charged with the excitement of contemporary form: swift, filmic montage and free use of the page space. His poems dig, probe, reveal, expose the language as it is lived, with a range possibly unequalled in any British poet. Their sharp diagnoses of social domination and the ideas that sustain and mask it are a wake-up call. But there is nothing dry about them: they savour language, ask you to dance with it, show you the pain in it, enlarge the world with it. Griffiths was a key member of the British Poetry Revival, both as an activist in the Poetry Society and in the small press scene, and as a writer of inventive, formally innovative poetry. He continues to explore the shapes of contemporary experience, and to denounce agencies of unfreedom. By now he is the author of a large body of work, which this book seeks to make available to ordinary readers. The essays collected here offer guides to reading, commentaries on forms and sources, and a range of insights into how the poems work. There is also a bibliography, an interview, photographs and visuals, all of which help to give a vivid sense of Griffiths’s world.
Bill Griffiths (1948-2007) was born in Middlesex. He began writing poetry and publishing in 1970, benefitting from the guidance of Eric Mottram, Bob Cobbing, and many others on the little press scene. He went on to study Old English at King’s College, London, obtaining a PhD in 1987. He was Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Northern Studies, Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne and lived in Seaham, County Durham. He died on 13 September 2007.
Alan Halsey was born in London. He ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye from 1979-96 and moved to Sheffield in 1997, continuing to work as a specialist bookseller and as editor of West House Books. His major publications include Five Years Out (1989), The Text of Shelley’s Death (1995), A Robin Hood Book (1996) and Wittgenstein’s Devil (2000). He has written several short studies of Thomas Lovell Beddoes and re-edited his Death’s Jest-Book in 2003. Alan died in October 2022.
Jeff Nuttall was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, in 1933 and grew up in Herefordshire. He trained as a painter in the years following the Second World War and began writing poetry in 1962. He published widely with Writers’ Forum, Turret Press, Unicorn Press, Fulcrum, Trigram, Pirate Press, Rivelin and Penguin (Modern Poets No. 12). He taught fine art in schools and polytechnics, and acted in film and television. He lived in Crickhowell, Wales and died in 2004.
William Rowe teaches contemporary British and Latin American poetry at Birkbeck College, where he is Director of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. He has written on Maggie O’Sullivan, Lee Harwood, Eric Mottram, Allen Fisher, and William Carlos Williams and is the author of Three Lyric Poets: Lee Harwood, Barry MacSweeney and Chris Torrance, forthcoming from Northcote House in the Writers and Their Work series. His translations of contemporary Latin American poets have been widely published, and he has three books on Latin American poetry, including Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life (OUP, 2000).
