Sign-In
Cart
Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems: Collected Poems & Selected Prose
Paperback
Publisher Price: $19.95
ISBN13: 9781780373614
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Published: May 26 2016
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
The disappearance of the poet Rosemary Tonks in the 1970s was one of the literary world's most tantalising mysteries - the subject of a BBC feature in 2009 called The Poet Who Vanished. After publishing two extraordinary poetry collections - and six satirical novels - she turned her back on the literary world after a series of personal tragedies and medical crises which made her question the value of literature and embark on a restless, self-torturing spiritual quest. This involved totally renouncing poetry, and suppressing her own books. Interviewed earlier in 1967, she spoke of her direct literary forebears as Baudelaire and Rimbaud: 'They were both poets of the modern metropolis as we know it and no one has bothered to learn what there is to be learned from them...The main duty of the poet is to excite - to send the senses reeling.'
Her poetry - published in Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967) - is exuberantly sensuous, a hymn to sixties hedonism set amid the bohemian nighttime world of a London reinvented through French poetic influences and sultry Oriental imagery. She was 'Bedouin of the London evening' in one poem: 'I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown / My private modern life has gone to waste.'
All her published poetry is now available here for the first time in over 40 years, along with a selection of her prose. This second edition has an expanded introduction and an additional prose piece.
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Alighieri, Dante
Pitavy, Francois
Paperback
Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (by the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Lao Tzu
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Paperback
A Bowl of Goodness: Nourishing Poems with a Side of Soup, Celebrating Community, Friendship, and Resilience
Jackson, Major
Hardcover