Anthony Thwaite

Geoffrey Bownas

A broad-reaching anthology contains accessible translations of more than 700 poems and includes selections from periods ranging from the Nara and Heian to the Kamakura and Muramachi eras, in a treasury that includes examples of tanka, haiku and complex forms. Reprint.

The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse

Philip Larkin

Seven hundred of the great poet's letters are collected here offering a moving, instructive portrait of Larken, from his early correspondence with school friends to his last year of life, 1985, when he died at the age of sixty-three.

1940-1985

Selected Letters of Philip Larkin

A prefatory section on Japanese prosody provides an illustrative background for this poetic collection

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was the best-loved poet of his generation, and the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and the W H Smith Award. In Larkin at Sixty, a tribute to him on his sixtieth birthday, twenty writers came together to celebrate the man and the poet with specially written pieces. Some of them are reminiscences, some look at aspects of his professional life as librarian, some consider his taste as it revealed itself in his writings on jazz and in his editing of the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. The relationship between his novels and his poems is examined, and several essays explore the poems themselves. Three poets contribute hitherto unpublished poems. Together, all these illuminate with affection and insight the work, the man behind the work, and the appeal of both. The editor, Anthony Thwaite, edited Larkin's Collected Poems, Selected Letters and Further Requirements, and became one of Larkin's chosen literary executors

Anthony Thwaite

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