William Plomer: Selected Poems

He was E. M Forster s favourite contemporary poet . W. H Auden extolled his first-class visual imagination . Stephen Spender considered his output among the best English poems written in the present century . Yet for most readers, William Plomer (19031973) is now a faintly-remembered name. Born in Pietersburg, South Africa, Plomer settled in London in 1929, where he went on to occupy a central position in English letters. By the time of his death he had published ten books of poetry. In a voice impersonal and strange, Plomer s best poems reveal a mind that delights in the sensory, pictorial and plastic (though not, as he thought, at the expense of the metaphysical). Glittering surfaces are replete with hidden dangers: The Mediterranean sighs Because it is so calm: On an evening such as this The rustling of a palm Seems almost ominous, Whispering of nemesis. [Sounds of Pleasure: Cannes, 1938 ] By turns lyrical, amatory, satirical and dramatic, Plomer addresses his favourite subjectsAfrica, the divided self, aesthetic pleasure, the macabre and the absurdwith a formal assurance, bleak wit and urgency of feeling.This rich and thorough selection presents, for the first time in almost fifty years, Plomer s best. "