Collected Poems: Burns Singer

Description

Burns Singer spent the 1950s gaining and losing a reputation. He became an insider, notably as a writer of “Times Literary Supplement” leaders, yet considered himself an Outsider, alienating a generation of young editors and fellow poets. His attitude to the Movement was one of contempt. His sympathies were with the Apocalyptics of the 1940s. W.S. Graham, George Barker and Dylan Thomas were influences that he absorbed and outgrew, but never repudiated. His poetry fuses Apocalyptic sublimity with the principled intelligence of the Movement. “The Transparent Prisoner” is a major contribution to the poetry of the Second World war, based on experiences of an escaped PoW. “Still and All”, the title poem of Singer’s one collection, beautifully distils his “ways/Of speech”. Singer can be as mocking, down-to-earth and up-to-date as Larkin or Amis, but the theme to which he invariably returns is immortality – in his own haunting words, “The least of things and least preposterous/Of the infinities that robe you round”. This edition reprints the contents of “Collected Poems” (1970), adding uncollected and unpublished poems. The work is arranged (as far as possible) chronologically, with an introduction and notes. Among the poems which appear in print here for the first time is one consisting of two untitled lines, handwritten on the back of a 1963 review slip: “I said I’d meet you on the other side/Of all this clutter & I did set out”. At last Burns Singer has arrived.