Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley

Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley
Author: Rory Waterman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317175247

Focusing on the significance of place, connection and relationship in three poets who are seldom considered in conjunction, Rory Waterman argues that Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley epitomize many of the emotional and societal shifts and mores of their age. Waterman looks at the foundations underpinning their poetry; the attempts of all three to forge a sense of belonging with or separateness from their readers; the poets’ varying responses to their geographical and cultural origins; the belonging and estrangement that inheres in relationships, including marriage; the forced estrangements of war; the antagonism between social belonging and a need for isolation; and, finally, the charged issues of faith and mortality in an increasingly secularized country.

Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley

Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley
Author: Dr Rory Waterman
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1409470873

Focusing on the significance of place, connection and relationship in three poets who are seldom considered in conjunction, Rory Waterman argues that Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley epitomize many of the emotional and societal shifts and mores of their age.

R.S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God

R.S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God
Author: D.Z. Phillips
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 205
Release: 1986-01-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0915138832

This book is one philosopher's response to the poetry of R. S. Thomas. It examines the poet's struggle with the possibilities of sense in religion: R. S. Thomas has described his poetry as an obsession with the possibility of having 'conversations or linguistic confrontations with ultimate reality'. Some attempts at giving meaning to religious belief cannot withstand the assaults of criticism. In R. S. Thomas's verse, however, there emerges a hard-won celebration of the worship of a hidden God; a rare achievement in contemporary poetry. In plotting the course of the development of the poetry, the book brings out its many similarities with the thrusts and counter-thrusts of argument in the philosophy of religion in the second half of the twentieth century. The book should be of interest not only to admirers of R. S. Thomas, but to philosophers, theologians, students of literature, and to anyone concerned with questions concerning the sense or senselessness of religious belief.

Philip Larkin Poems

Philip Larkin Poems
Author: Philip Larkin
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2012-04-05
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0571271766

For the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkin's four collections and on his uncollected poems. Chosen by Martin Amis. 'Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh - or, in that curious phrase, "laugh out loud" (as if there's another way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom?... Larkin, often, is more than memorable: he is instantly unforgettable.' - Martin Amis

Sarajevo Roses

Sarajevo Roses
Author: Rory Waterman
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Total Pages: 71
Release: 2017-11-30
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1784104094

Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Sarajevo Roses is Rory Waterman's second collection of poems. From the start we are in the company of a poet on the move . On sleeper trains, in cars and on foot, Waterman takes us into Mediterranean Europe, to Palma's Bellver Castle, to Venice, to Krujë, to the Italian ghost-town Craco, and to St Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, where 'selfie-sticks dance before us at the altar'. Sarajevo's 'neatened muddle of terracotta and concrete' is twinned with the 'church spires and rain-bright roofs' of the poet's former hometown, Lincoln. The Sarajevo rose of the book's title – a mortar crater filled with red resin, in remembrance – is less an overarching symbol here than one example of the past inscribed upon the present – culturally in our architecture, individually on our bodies – and of the instinct to preserve wounds as a mark of respect, or warning. Surrounded by the war-shaped, memorial landscapes of Europe, the poet is faced by those smaller wars and memorials one carries within, marks left by lovers, friends, relations, and past selves.

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
Author: Wendy Cope
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 74
Release: 2010-07-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0571259413

When Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was first published, it catapulted its author into the bestseller lists and established her as one of our funniest and most eloquent poets. There are so many kinds of awful men - One can't avoid them all. She often said She'd never make the same mistake again: She always made a new mistake instead. (from 'Rondeau Redoublé')

Poets of the Second World War

Poets of the Second World War
Author: Rory Waterman
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2016
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0746312806

An overview of the English-language poetry of the Second World War, focusing on five of the most remarkable poets of that conflict: Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Karl Shapiro, Sidney Keyes and Charles Causley.

A Short History of English Literature

A Short History of English Literature
Author: Harry Blamires
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 493
Release: 2013-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134942109

First published in 2012. This work of introduction is designed to escort the reader through some six centuries of English literature. It begins in the fourteenth century at the point at which the language written in our country is recognizably our own, and ends in the 1950s. It is a compact survey, summing up the substance and quality of the individual achievements that make up our literature. The aim is to leave the reader informed about each writer’s main output, sensitive to the special character of his gifts, and aware of his place in the story of our literature as a whole.

W. H. Davies

W. H. Davies
Author: Rory Waterman
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2021-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1785274570

Though Davies is a well-known and unique literary figure of the early twentieth century, most famous now for The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp and poems such as ‘Leisure’, which came 14th in the BBC’s search to find ‘The Nation’s Favourite Poems’, no other volume of essays, or other critical monograph, concentrates on his work. This book not only provides a reassessment of Davies, putting him in his literary and cultural context, but also sheds light on the many more central literary figures he encountered and befriended. The central aim of the book is to reconsider his major works and his place in the literary and cultural milieu of his period.