As When: A Selection

by Tom Raworth, Miles Champion (Editor)

Poet Tom Raworth has remained steadfastly independent of literary fashions, movements, and cliques throughout a poetic career spanning 50 years. As When is the first selection of Raworth’s writing to address the full scope and range of his work, from the first poem he ever shared with anyone outside his family, “You Were Wearing Blue,” to his most recently published poem, “Surfing the Permafrost Through Methane Flares.” The collection includes prose work and notational pieces that were intentionally left out of his Collected Poems , along with poems that were only published in small magazines or as ephemeral cards and broadsides. Some pieces appear in correct, definitive versions for the first time.

280 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2015

About the author

Early poetry showed the influences of the Black Mountain and New York School poets, particularly Robert Creeley and John Ashbery together with strands from European poetry (Apollinaire), Dada, and Surrealism. His 1974 book Ace saw Raworth move to a more disjunctive style, built from short, unpunctuated lines that entice the reader into following multiple syntactic possibilities, as they knit together everything from observations of the everyday to self-reflexive commentary on the acts of thinking and writing, to affectionate lifts from pulp fiction and film noir, to political satire. A series of long poems in this mode followed--after Ace came Writing (composed 1975-77; published 1982), Catacoustics (composed 1978-81; published 1991) and West Wind (composed 1982-83; published 1984). Subsequent projects have extended this mode into a kaleidoscopic sequence of 14-line poems (not exactly "sonnets") that extended through "Sentenced to Death" (in Visible Shivers, 1987), Eternal Sections (1993) and Survival (1994). Later collections include Clean & Well Lit (1996), Meadow (1999), Caller and Other Pieces (2007) and Let Baby Fall (2008). Raworth's 650-page Collected Poems was published in 2003, though a number of major works remain uncollected, including his uncategorizable prose-work A Serial Biography (1969), a uniquely vertiginous patchwork of autobiography and fiction.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Raworth)

Reviews

[Goodreeds User · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing - might have a new favourite poet - huge w

[Cameron Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

most consistently impressive poetry collection I have read in a while! Absolutely love it and can’t help but emulate this poetry myself now - always a good thing

[Marissa]

I definitely need to return to this collection--this reading of it was rushed, but it has caught my attention enough that I know I need to come back to it later and take my time.