Alan Brownjohn's collection of poems from 1952-1983.

Collected poems, 1952-83

Literature & Fiction

Brownjohn, Alan

Poetry

Secker Warburg

Collected Poems

Faber and Faber

Philip Larkin (Writers and Their Work)

History & Criticism

Liverpool University Press

Windows on the Moon

GARDNERS VI BOOKS AMS006

Windows On The Moon

Literary

Black Spring Press Ltd.

The variety of theme and mood, impressive technical command and characteristic element of surprise  – this is a writer whose work can never be taken for granted - ensure that The Cat Without E-mail will enhance an already considerable reputation. The collection revisits Brownjohn's childhood and adolescence as a 1930s' and wartime child, reflects wistfully on romantic adventures and unrealised ambitions, elegises his old friend Gavin Ewart, entertains with surreal dreams, sends up Sherlock Holmes and The Merchant of Venice and along the way humorously surveys avalanche dogs, a bug and a mosquito, and inevitably a cat without e-mail.

The Cat Without E-Mail

Enitharmon Press

In The Men Around Her Bed, Alan Brownjohn writes about experiences from childhood (the memory of hearing Neville Chamberlain’s 1939 declaration of war) on into the present, sometimes in precisely dated poems. He is perennially concerned with the impact of momentous events and changes on day-to-day life; his acute sense of detail recently earned him the soubriquet, in the TLS, of the doyen of the diurnal’. In this new collection, he juxtaposes religious belief and unbelief, transmutes quirky social observation into poetry, indulges jokes and fantasies, and praises  or commemorates  friends. The poem which provides the title of the collection is an unconventional and mysterious celebration of his life; for which, in the words of Sean O’Brien, his poetry shows an undiminished appetite’.

The Men Around Her Bed

A sixty-poem sequence brings a new departure in Alan Brownjohn’s poetry. Ludbrooke’ is a rueful, proud, somewhat devious figure who negotiates the hurdles and snares of an older man’s life with  or so he likes to think  a combination of principle, aplomb, dexterity and romantic flair. Yet his successes are few and modest, and his strategies suggest an alter ego which his creator is obliged to disown. Ludbrooke has been linked by some with the appearance in earlier poems of a character called The Old Fox’. But Ludbrooke behaves as if he is younger in spirit, more agile and varied in his activities. These 13-line poems  described by the poet Peter Reading as sonnets for the unlucky’  broadly cover three years of Ludbrooke’s day-to-day life in multicultural 21st-century Britain: a batch of near-love affairs, worries about the figure he cuts among friends, battles with work and alcohol  but finally a determination never to give up. The Others’ in Brownjohn’s remarkable new volume  other poems rather than personalities  address a characteristically wide range of subjects: love, disquieting memories, features of a post-industrial world given an edge of slightly surreal fantasy. Some are intensely personal, others look outwards with the alert eye he has always brought to his poems of social observation. Everything in Ludbrooke and Others is achieved with craft and elegance, and in the distinctive voice which makes every poem by this poet instantly recognizable and enjoyable.

Ludbrooke & Others

About Alan Brownjohn's last individual volume of poems, Ludbrooke and Others, Sean O'Brien wrote in the Sunday Times, "If you don't find yourself laughing at and with Ludbrooke, the chances are that you're a Puritan or dead or both." Brownjohn's new book is one of his most varied and resourceful to date, featuring not only characteristically funny and entertaining poems and mysterious, gripping narratives (the title poem) but also moving tributes and elegies, love poems, and some absorbing social observation. It will confirm his reputation as "one of the most reliably enjoyable of writers."

A Bottle and Other Poems

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Books by Brownjohn, Alan