Sylvia Townsend Warner Selected Poems - Hardcover

Warner, Sylvia Townsend

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670808504 ISBN 13: 9780670808502

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1986

Synopsis

Deals with myths, magic, love, the past, death, nature, religion, the mind, wishes, dreams, and parenthood

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

This posthumous collection of 47 stories is an impressive legacy that embodies a numinous talent. A prolific author of novels, poetry and biography, Warner's mastery of her art remains exemplary in its powerful complexity, its finely honed, unsentimental perceptiveness and immediacy of description, deep sensitivity and literate, graceful style. Many of the stories (written between 1932 and 1977) are set in English villages and focus on middle-aged protagonists often enduring rather than transcending their ostensibly unremarkable lives, confronting losses and botched opportunities and sometimes breaking out of bounds to manifest themselves. But Warner can as well evoke the feelings of a young German soldier fighting for Fascism in Spain, or a devout Mexican pastry-cook. Occasionally the author's wicked wit flattens her characters and makes her stories reductive, yet her mastery of her craft sustains their quality. The collection ends with extracts from her autobiographical writings and the magical Kingdoms of Elfin , cruel fairy tales about mortality and aging, which manifest her protean imagination and powerfully celebrate the natural world viewed with a clear, unsparing eye.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Warner, Sylvia Townsend. Selected Poems. Viking. 1985. c.95p. afterwd. by Claire Harman. ISBN 0-670-80850-4. $14.95. poetry Both these collections are posthumous publications by poets who did not enjoy a wide popular acclaim during their lifetimes. The similarity ends there. Warner (1893-1978) was known primarily as a novelist and short story writer. Although Harman, her editor, numbers Yeats and Housman among the admirers of her verse, much of it seems imitative of the major poets of her era. Her love poems are tender and passionate, her social commentary is perceptive and wryly amusing; but the poems often seem labored. Niedecker (1903-1970), on the other hand, often seems ahead of her time. Nature is her primary subject matter, and she explores that natural world in terse, often haiku-like poems, using a step-down line, dashes, and spare syntax. Her observations are those of a poet at home in the environment she chooses to write about, and her language that of one who dares to explore unfamiliar terrain. Grace Bauer, formerly with New Orleans P.L.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0670808504
• ISBN 13: 9780670808502
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128