To Hell with Paradise

New and Selected Poems

Reeves Gareth

"To Hell with Paradise" is a wonderfully various and mature collection by a scrupulous and accomplished writer. It distills Gareth Reeves' collections "Real Stories" (1984) and Listening In (1993), adding previously unpublished poems and sequences, including a selection from "Nuncle Music", a sequence of monologues in the voice of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Distance was the occasion for poems in "Real Stories": in California, where Reeves lived from 1970-1975, he wrote about England, in England about California. Distance is not only geographical: poems explore the landscape of memory too. From "Listening In" comes the sequence, by turns humorous, painful, wry and eloquent, about Reeves's father, poet and critic James Reeves. The poems are enlivened by what Gavin Ewart called a "negative spikiness".

About the Author

Gareth Reeves studied at the University of Oxford and at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship. Until recently he was Reader in English at Durham University, where he ran an MA creative writing course in poetry. Carcanet Press have published four collections of his poetry, "Real Stories" (1984), "Listening In" (1993), "To Hell with Paradise: New and Selected Poems" (2012), and "Nuncle Music" (2013), a sequence of monologues in the voice of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. He is also the author of two books on T.S. Eliot, the co-author of a book on poetry of the 1930s, and many essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, American and Irish poetry.

Reviews

"The new poems... are a bravura performance – spare, powerful, contained and witty... The poet's ear has perfect pitch... His emotional reach into the realms of pain, loss, ageing and associated existential vertigo is all the more impressive for its formal minimalism and restraint. 'Is there life after poetry?' he asks at one point: not without poems like this, the reader may feel... It is a heady experience" – John Weston, The London Magazine

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