Stephen Romer is unlike any other contemporary poet: the 'Tribute' paid in his long-awaited third collection is divided between homage and exaction. The homage is voluntary and finds several recipients, the exaction only one. Much turns on the question of idealization, experienced as emotional necessity in the face of love, that 'terrible crystallization'. Writing on Romer's earlier work, Thom Gunn remarked on the 'wide range of interests which open up the imagination to mythologies of the mind'. This new book constitutes a powerful amplification of those mythologies. This book is intended for poetry readers, students.

Stephen Romer:Tribute (Oxford Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Romer, Stephen

Poetry

Carcanet Press Ltd.

<p>The response of one writer to the work of another can be doubly illuminating. In this series a contemporary poet introduces and selects works by a poet of the past that they have particularly admired.</p>

Robert Herrick (Poet to Poet)

History & Criticism

Faber&Faber

<p>Set Thy Love in Order: New &amp; Selected Poems gathers the work of some thirty years, taken from Stephen Romer’s four previous collections, along with a substantial selection of new poems. Stephen Romer has been described as ‘one of our finest poets of thwarted or impossible love’ (Adam Thorpe in the Guardian) and the title of this New &amp; Selected is a Dantescan objurgation as old as the Trecento: Ordina qu’est amore, o tu che m’ami – set thy love in order, o thou who lovest me. Romer’s central theme is encapsulated by these words, and his prolonged and painstaking exploration of the ‘intermittences of the heart’, frequently carried out with a Francophile self-consciousness and a rueful wit, constitute so many variations on the theme.</p>

Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems

Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism (Transcript)

Legenda

Stressing the urgency and high stakes involved in poetic composition, each poem in this collection is a sharp peak of concentration where intellect and emotion battle for control. Triggered by things such as a love affair or a configuration of light, these short pieces attempt to record the mysterious and rare coincidences between the realm of idea and the world of perception.

Yellow Studio (Oxford Poets)