Diffractions

New and Collected Poems

Dale Peter

Peter Dale combines intimacy of address and a personal colloquial idiom with remarkable skill in formal verse. He is interested in bringing his subjects – love, relationships, memory, all kinds of daily exchange – directly to the reader, without fuss and with thoughtful craft and conviction. The precision of his writing matches its intensity of feeling. "Diffractions" begins with new poems and ends with a collection of lively and entertaining epigrams. Between these, his published collections appear in chronological sequence. The whole assembles 50 years of elegant, incisive and moving work by a leading British poet of rare skill.

About the Author

Peter Dale was born in Addleston, Surrey in 1938 and educated at St Peter's College, Oxford. He worked as a secondary school teacher before becoming a freelance writer in 1993. He was co-editor of the poetry journal Agenda for many years. He is renowned for his translations from French (Corbiere, Laforgue, Valery and Villon) and Italian (a complete terza rima English version of Dante's Divine Comedy). His new and selected poems, "Edge to Edge", appeared in 1997 and was followed by Under the Breath in 2002 and Local Habitation in 2009. He now lives in Cardiff.

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