At the Garden's Dark Edge: Selected Poems

by Anthony Thwaite, Kevin J. Gardner (Editor), Michael Frayn (Preface by)

Overview

Anthony Thwaite (1930-2021) was one of the most formidable voices in postwar English letters. Deeply esteemed by fellow poets and critics for his original and technically controlled poetry, Thwaite composed in traditional forms, with orderly stanzas, rhyme schemes, and metrical lines that scan. His voice was highly personal, cautiously intimate, and often witty, and he wrote with a gratifying clarity and freedom from abstraction, making him among the most accessible of modern poets.

At the Garden’s Dark Edge is a collection of a hundred of Thwaite’s poems, selected from a span of more than sixty years, exploring his major themes and recurring topics—among them, the consolations of domestic life, the pleasures of language and creativity, and the many humans and other animals in his life. He was inspired by travel and life abroad—most notably Libya, Japan, and the American South—and his poems deeply engage the individuals and cultures he encountered. A lifelong archaeologist, Thwaite also explored the ruins of the past and what we may recover by exploring it. Intriguingly, his work also faces life’s most vexing questions from the perspective of a serious Christian faith.

This volume contains several poems that have never been reprinted or collected, and one that has never before been published. By making his work more accessible than ever before, At the Garden’s Dark Edge aims to introduce Anthony Thwaite to a new generation of readers and preserve his legacy for future generations. A preface by playwright and novelist Michael Frayn accompanies an editor’s introduction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781481321839
Publisher:	Baylor University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2024
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Anthony Thwaite (1930-2021) was a prolific postwar English poet and critic, widely known for his editing and commentary on the collected poems and letters of his friend Philip Larkin.

Kevin J. Gardner is Professor of English at Baylor University, whose work focuses on eighteenth- and twentieth-century British literature.

What People are Saying About This

Jameela Lares

This rich collection of poems should delight anyone who appreciates language crafted to its best advantage. Anthony Thwaite’s deft combination of sound with sense is a pleasure throughout. Thwaite again and again demonstrates how an ethical vision of all aspects of his experience can allow a poet sanely to describe his participation in the world.

Neil Powell

Although Anthony Thwaite wryly acknowledged the early influence of Philip Larkin, his own poetry developed over a long writing career in rather different ways. His range—geographical, historical and, above all, archaeological—is far greater than Larkin’s; his characteristic method is to take a particular object or occasion and to excavate it affectionately or critically (or both). Thwaite is a substantial, civilised poet: he addresses his readers with lucidity and sometimes with impish wit, as members of a shared literary community. This selection, arranged thematically rather than chronologically, is full of fascinating juxtapositions, and it includes some hitherto uncollected rarities among many of his better-known poems.

author of Wicked Gregory Maguire

I've held the work of this keen and clinically observant writer in the highest regard since I first came across it. Anthony Thwaite is, as we sometimes say in my haunts and harbors, the real deal.

C. K. Stead

Anthony Thwaite’s poems are adroit. He wears traditional forms so lightly, with such wit, intelligence, and often with a sly undertone of comedy. His is a very English voice. The work can be sad and serious, when that is what the occasion calls for; but the tone manages always to affirm. I have long admired Thwaite’s work and am very happy to endorse this excellently chosen and edited selection.

Blake Morrison

'The writer makes a life from mysteries,' Anthony Thwaite believed, and it’s as an archaeologist of daily life, unearthing the mysteries of love, work, marriage, and parenthood, that he excels. He’s a collector of shards, rescuing past lives and lost civilisations, but rooting them in his own time: 'What I really want is things/To tell me what I have been.' The voice is steady, plain-speaking, resistant to extravagance, but it doesn’t shirk fear or tragedy. This exemplary selection shows Thwaite at his artful best, as he travels widely in time and place while teasing out the continuities of human experience, 'water under the bridge, still flowing on.'

From the Publisher

Anthony Thwaite’s poems are adroit. He wears traditional forms so lightly, with such wit, intelligence, and often with a sly undertone of comedy. His is a very English voice. The work can be sad and serious, when that is what the occasion calls for; but the tone manages always to affirm. I have long admired Thwaite’s work and am very happy to endorse this excellently chosen and edited selection.

C.K. Stead

Anthony Thwaite’s poems are adroit. He wears traditional forms so lightly, with such wit, intelligence, and often with a sly undertone of comedy. His is a very English voice. The work can be sad and serious, when that is what the occasion calls for; but the tone manages always to affirm. I have long admired Thwaite’s work and am very happy to endorse this excellently chosen and edited selection.