Body Language

Description

Body language and the body of language - from the first words in the first garden to the last words of last night's lovers - are the entwined themes of Jon Stallworthy's new collection of poems, his first since The Guest from the Future (1995), described by Poetry Review as 'snatches of radio traffic from this century's storms, true stories ...and some of the storytelling inspired'. The centrepiece of the book is 'Skyhorse', an ambitious poem that finds the White Horse on the Berkshire Downs an enduring presence through three millennia of English history.

Jon Stallworthy was born in 1935, A Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford. He has published seven books of poetry including Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems (1998) and The Guest from the Future (1995). His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. N. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

"Stallworthy s craft is like embroidery, delicately weaving rhyme and rhythm, art and life, present and past." Richard Tyrell, "Independent," on "Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems""