Full Description
Andrew Crozier (1943-2008) was a poet, and an energiser of poetry. A champion of work excluded from the familiar canon, he brought to the English literary landscape of the 1960s and 70s an engagement with the energies of American poetry. As a publisher and critic he helped to create a space for new voices within English poetry: for George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Roy Fisher, J.H. Prynne. His own poetry is meticulous in its attention to language, exhilarating in its inventiveness and force. Crozier wrote that, for him, 'becoming a poet had to do with finding a mode for making sense of ... being alive', and his writing is alive with the possibilities of language.
Ian Brinton, editor of The Use of English until 2011 and author of Contemporary Poetry Since 1990, has brought together a comprehensive selection of Crozier's poetry and prose, much of it previously out of print or scattered in small press publications. Biographical and critical notes and a detailed bibliography complete this landmark edition of one of the essential figures in modern poetry.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A Note on the Text
I Cambridge and New York
Train Rides
1Name & Nature
2Drill Poem
3Getting Ready To Come Back Here
4['Your smell']
5['You turn']
6Early Morning, Night Sorting Shift
7['Young men from old poets should learn']
8The Lunatic
9['All across this country standing']
10['Daily, and']
A note on the train, January 1966
Loved Litter of Time Spent
The Americans
Numbers Are Adjectives: Counting Cats
A Judy
The Elders
What Spokes, and to What Hub?
A Spring Song
On Romney Marsh
Second Song in Spring
An Invocation: To Snow For
The Daffodil on my Table
The City Rises
The Evening's Occupation
The Joke
Poem
Some Other Occasion: Joan's
The American Valentine
Privy Business
Thor's Fishing Trip
There are Names
A Poem of Men
The Rainbow
With Her New Lover
How Does It Go?
II Essex and Keele
Walking on Grass
FROM THE ROOT
At Least I've A Roof Over My Head
Three Night Pieces
Ways With Dice
Towards
Marriage
The Kitchen
Sweet Words on Honeyed Lips
Nowhere to Fly To
A Day, a Garden, Stay Awake to Dream
The Harp
Now Evening, Last Night and Tonight
A Small Orchard
Stay On and What Is Lost
Sprung from the Root
Tired, Dies
Out of the Deep
Follow, Shadow
For Amity
Seaside Fragments
Two Poems
Out of Slumber
WALKING ON GRASS
Curtain
Love Poem
Fan Heater
In Daylight
Alarm
Stepping, into her Dream
Natural History
Mirror Mirror
The Interference
Yellow
A Set of Nashe
Diary
To John James
Walking on Grass
Let's Go Faster
The Source
III Printed Circuit to The Veil Poem
Printed Circuit
The Author & His Work
Bankruptcy
Conversely
Moorland Glory, or Swann's Vestas
Coup de Main
Scintillating
Grow Your Own
Rosebud
The Corsaire
Charming
Dodo You're Not Dead
The Syntactic Revolution
I Remember You/You're Driving Me Crazy
Falling in Love With You (Take Two)
The Very Thought of You
The Song is You
For You
And I Can't Wait All Day For You
Neglected Information
North British Engine
An Island on Loch Lomond
Hotel Door St. Fallion
Looe in Devonshire
Looe
Aberfoyle
Langley Court in Kent
Kinnaird Table
Linlithgow and Stirlingshire Hounds
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Bourne End
At Tummell on the Loch
On the Loch
Leaving for the Motor on the Loch
At the Oil Works
The Zoo in Cairo
The Zoo in Cairo (II)
Grand Hotel
Helouan
The Dartmoor Fox Hounds
The Dartmoor Fox Hounds (II)
The Dartmoor
Bexhill or Anywhere Else
Oban Bay
The Veil Poem
0(left unfinished
1['In the dark there is a fretwork']
2['What hides in darkness and what truths']
3['In nature everything, we suppose, connects up']
4['Bend back the edges and pull what you see']
5['The coals in the stove glow red']
6['I stand before the last arch, which makes']
7['The wind blows around the house']
8['The electric light over the gateway']
9['What I know has day by day']
Coda for the Time Being
The Life Class
IV Pleats to Were There
Pleats
Duets
High Zero
Were There
Person to Person
Sussex Express
Sundials
Local Colour
Loopy Dupes
Utamaro Variations
As Though After John Brett
Cardiff Docks, After Sickert
Forsythia
The End of a Row of Conjectural Units
V All Where Each Is
Pretty Head
FIVE POEMS
Winter Intimacies 1978-1982
Upright Captions
Border with Cherubs
A New Compilation of Existence
Humiliation in its Disguises
HALF ARTIFICE
Clouds and Windows
Oh, That
Evaporation of a Dream
Distant Horizons
Survival Kit
Still Life
Marble Set
White Launch
Door Contre Jour
Light Release
Fifth Variation
Pilot Flame
Driftwood and Seacoal (Family Portrait)
VI On Objectivism
The Heifer: after Carl Rakosi
Inaugural and Valedictory: The Early Poetry of George Oppen
VII On British Poetry
Signs of Identity: Roy Fisher's A Furnace
Review of J.F. Hendry's A World Alien
VIII 'Free Running Bitch'
Free Running Bitch
Star Ground
Blank Misgivings
XI Resting on Laurels
Resting on Laurels
Selected Bibliography
Index of Poem Titles
Index of Poem First Lines
Index of Names
ILLUSTRATIONS
Drawing of Andrew Crozier by Fielding Dawson, New York 1965
Cover for Peter Riley and Andrew Crozier, Romney Marsh (1967), by Kathleen Crozier
Cover for Printed Circuit (1974), by Ian Tyson
Illustration for Printed Circuit (1974), by Ian Tyson
Cover for Neglected Information (1972), by Philip Crozier
Postcards sent from Jeff Morsman to Andrew Crozier, 1971
Cover for Pleats (1975), by Michael Simpson
Cover for High Zero (1978), by Ian Potts
Cover for Were There (1978), by Ian Potts
Letter from Carl Rakosi to Andrew Crozier, 7 June 1965
Carl Rakosi and Andrew Crozier, Cambridge 1997. Photograph by Jean Crozier
