Christopher Middleton's "Collected Poems" gathers over half a century's inventive, brilliant writing by one of Britain's genuinely Modern poets. Here is an English writer, a European sensibility, of exhilarating originality and passion. His concerns, he declares, include the strictly articulated tension between Being and Nothing, the stance and dance of sundry creatures, the nothing as a gerund, destructive evils as force. We will look here in vain for single "voice", though there is unprecedented singularity in the sheer variousness of his poetry's worlds.
About the Author
Christopher Middleton, born in Cornwall in 1926, is a poet and translator, especially of German literature. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and held academic positions at the University of Zurich and King's College London before becoming Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He retired in 1998. His "Collected Poems" appeared in 2008.
Reviews
"Middleton is amongst the most consistently inventive, original, and audacious of the so-called 'experimental' or 'innovative' poets of these past twenty-five years" – August Kleinzahler, Threepenny Review
"Metrically inventive and various, these poems are remarkably alive to 'the unknown thing beside us', they listen for 'the due sound', and, as if watching birds, register 'the timed flight of words'. A motto for reading Middleton's work might be: purify the source, then trust to luck" – Denis Donoghue, London Review of Books
"His work is at once rich and sparse, elegantly economic in its subtle shifts from discrete object to discrete object, yet, by contrast with mainstream English realism, striking for the boldness and brio of its imaginings" – Terry Eagleton, Stand
