Selected Poems

Description

Selected Poems collects the work of one of our foremost lyric poets, John Glenday. The elemental themes long associated with Glenday's name are strongly represented here: the sea, the sky; light and its absence; the spirit in the secular age; our natural and human ecologies, how they interact, and how they might survive the encounter; the transcendent states that arise from the simple contemplation of the earth; the hidden dimensions that lie behind familiar objects - and the hells, heavens and secret lives that hide within their very names. But new readers will also find a wonderful poet of familial and romantic love, as well as a sly humourist and satirist; as the book also features work from long-out-of-print early collections, they will also discover that Glenday's voice has always been uniquely his own. Glenday shares with W.S. Graham and Denise Riley an obsession with speech, silence, and limits of knowledge, and with what form the energies that flicker along the border might take. John Glenday is poet who constantly blindsides and moves us, whose direct and pure lyric brings us, again and again, face-to-face with the mystery of our being here.

John Glenday's first collection, The Apple Ghost won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and his second, Undark, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Grain (Picador, 2009), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for both the Ted Hughes Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His fourth collection The Golden Mean, also published by Picador, was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year and won the 2015 Roehampton Poetry Prize.

Sturdy, unabashed lyricism . . . a delight in the sheer physical presence of that world and, in particular, of Scotland, its landscapes and its cities * Guardian *