Collected poems : 1955-1975

Peter Levi, who died in 2000, was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1984. Until 1977 he was a Jesuit priest. He was a classicist whose writing includes three uncategorizable books - on modern Greece, Afghanistan, and the English landscape - as well as translations, critical and scholarly works, and a thriller. But he was first and foremost a poet. This volume brings together his early books, pamphlets and other uncollected poems written over a period of twenty years to 1975. His subsequent books of poetry are: "Five Ages" (1978), "Private Ground" (1981), "The Echoing Green" (1983), "The Lamentation of the Dead" (1984), "The Noise Made by Poems" (1984), "Shakespeare's Birthday" (1985), "Goodbye to the Art of Poetry" (1989), "Shadow and Bone" (1989), "The Rags of Time" (1994), "Reed Music" (1997) and "Viriditas" (2001).