W.S. Graham

One of the most unusual and original British poets of the last 100 years, the Scottish poet W.S. Graham had a career that fell into two distinct parts. His early work was rapt and wild and incantatory--poems filled with lingusitic fireworks that can be set beside those of his near contemporary Dylan Thomas, and it culminated in 1955 with "Nightfishing," a long poem of spectacular resonance and a tour de force of twentieth century verse. After that Graham, who lived almost penniless with his wife in a tiny cottage near the coast of Cornwall, did not publish another book until the 1970s, at which point, however, his work underwent an extraordinary late flowering. This later work, beginning with the celebrated volume Malcolm Mooney's Land, is stark and quizzical and raw, a continual examination of thought and feeling that is also an ongoing exploration into the nature of poetic form, at once intimate and metaphysical, wry and elegiac. As Michael Hofmann makes clear in his introduction to his new selection of Graham's work, Graham's late achievement makes him one of the great poetic voices of the English language.

“"His song is unique and his work is an inspiration....W.S. Graham drank and ate poetry every day of his life." --Harold Pinter "[W.S. Graham] is a poet of spectacular sophistication and originality and the supreme comic poet of our time." --Dennis O'Driscoll”

“His song is unique and his work is an inspiration....W.S. Graham drank and ate poetry every day of his life.” —Harold Pinter

“[W.S. Graham] is a poet of spectacular sophistication and originality and the supreme comic poet of our time.” —Dennis O’Driscoll

W.S. Graham's (1918-1986) was born to a working-class family in Scotland and spent most of his adult life in Cornwall. His first collection of poetry, Cage without Grievance, was published in 1942. He went on to publish several collections throughout his life, including The White Threshold, The Nightfishing, and Malcolm Mooney's Land.

Michael Hofmann is an acclaimed poet, translator, and critic. He has published six books of poetry and has translated more than sixty books from the German, including works by Ernst J3nger, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth. His criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books,The New York Review of Books, and Poetry. His Where Have You Been?- Selected Essays was published in 2014. His new translation of Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz will be publishing in the NYRB Classics series in Spring 2018. He currently teaches poetry and translation at the University of Florida.

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