Thwaite, Anthony. Collected Poems. London

Book Reviews / Religion and the Arts 12 (2008) 602–629 623 Th waite, Anthony. Collected Poems. London: Enitharmon Press, 2007; Chester Springs PA: Dufour Editions, 2008. Pp. 448. £25.00, $66.95 cloth. ver the course of more than fi fty years, Anthony Th waite has sus- Otained a signifi cant outpouring of poems distinguished by their tech- nical control, metrical regularity, and striking originality. Avoiding the fl ashier trends of the last half-century, he has continued to produce a formal yet highly personal body of work. It is thus a rewarding pleasure to encounter Th waite’s poetry now collected, for the fi rst time in his career, in a substantive though not complete edition. Th e 380 personally selected poems in this volume comprise a survey of his individual books of poetry published between 1957 and 2003. Th is Collected Poems is a fi tting cap- stone for Th waite’s lifelong commitment to poetry, an encomium for a poet whose gifts are of the highest order. Th is is breathtaking and prodi- gious poetry, rooted in the British tradition yet entirely singular. Born in 1930, Anthony Th waite read English on scholarship at Christ Church, where he edited Isis and Oxford Poetry and presided over the Oxford Poetry Society. In a varied career he has worked as a BBC radio producer, as a publishing director at André Deutsch, as literary editor of the Listener and New Statesman, and as co-editor of Encounter. Th ough he has spent the majority of his life in England, Th waite has traveled widely, including teaching stints in Japan and Libya, and he is deeply interested in archaeology, editing Th e Ruins of Time: Antiquarian and Archaeological Poems (Eland) in 2006. As a literary executor of Philip Larkin, Th waite has also edited three volumes of Larkin’s writings, including the Collected Poems, not surprising perhaps for one who began his poetic career as an adherent of Th e Movement. Th waite did not remain in Larkin’s shadow for long, however, eschewing the older poet’s habit of melancholy meditations on the end of Englishness for a broader perspective, writing quietly but with aff ection for a world in space and time more expansive than the borders of his own England. Perhaps as a consequence of the unassuming nature of the poet and of his poetry, Th waite has generated very little attention from academic scholars. He has nonetheless enjoyed the great admiration of countless contemporary writers and critics. Many of these have lent their names and pocketbooks to participate in a scheme to underwrite the exorbitant cost of publishing a book of this sort, and they are among those acknowledged in an august (and Augustan) List of Subscribers comprising some 175-plus © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156852908X357506 624 Book Reviews / Religion and the Arts 12 (2008) 602–629 individuals. It is gratifying to see such an outpouring of support for Th waite who, like Peter Levi and Alan Brownjohn, remains inexplicably and unjus- tifi ably ignored by scholars of contemporary poetry. Once readers have the chance to delve into this judicious collection of verse, the mysterious neglect of Th waite may soon end. Th waite’s roots in Th e Movement will be readily apparent, as in the early poem “Sunday Afternoons” (1963). Th is tightly disciplined 32-line piece adumbrates the aura of isolation and waste that typify much post-war writing about Britain, a scene set in a nameless train station buff et where pas- sengers are not traveling but only waiting: “But mostly they sit and stare / At the urns and the rock buns.” In a structure that epitomizes the mani- festo of Th e Movement to counter cultural chaos with poetic order, Th waite asserts control with four parallel stanzas of eight lines each, structured with the orderly rhyme scheme of a-b-c-d-d-c-b-a. Th e rhymes are true until the fi nal stanza, when the poet employs slant rhyme to add ominously to the poem’s despairing imagery expressed in impassive tones characteristic of Th e Movement. Although Th waite’s poetry would generally remain formal in structure, in subject his work would evolve as he began to push the boundaries of space and time in his verse. He would publish his fi rst Libyan poems in Th e Stones of Emptiness (Oxford University Press) in 1967, initiating a lifelong custom of writing from perspectives outside Britain. In 1987 he published a set of verses called Letter from Tokyo (Hutchinson), and one of his more recent books, Th e Dust of the World (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994) is fi lled with poems inspired by settings beyond Britain’s borders. His fascination with both the Near East and Far East is paired with an interest in reproducing voices from the past. Th e Stones of Emptiness concludes with a twelve-poem sequence entitled “Th e Letters of Synesius,” voiced by the fourth-century Libyan who became bishop of Ptolemais. Breaking free from metrical shackles, these epistolary poems, among Th waite’s fi nest achievements, reveal his strengths in dramatic characterization and the compelling rhythms of speech and thought. Th is experiment in dramatic monologue prepared Th waite for two sub- sequent volumes of poetry that would establish him as the great contemporary master of this form. In 1974 he published New Confessions (Oxford University Press), a sequence of fi fty poems that join prose and verse to recreate the musings of a better-known church father, Augustine of Hippo. In fact, Th waite’s re-imagining of his subject’s personal meditations is an attempt to create a likelier confession of Augustine’s spiritual life than can .

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