The Colosseum Critical Introduction to David Mason

by Gregory Dowling

"We learn a good deal about David Mason's life through his we learn of his family life and troubles, his travels, his loves, and his losses, but we never have the impression of being buttonholed by a man who is self-centered or egotistical. Partly this is because we are convinced of the numerous ways in which the life he recounts is connected to other lives, to places and to historical events. But it is mainly because we always sense how closely what he recounts is related to ourselves. As with all major poets, his voice becomes our own."

This book examines the career of David Mason in detail, from his very first volume (1990) to his most recent publications, bringing out the full range of his accomplishments in a number of different genres - lyrics, narrative poetry, children's verse, drama, and opera libretti - while also examininghis critical essays and memoirs. While offering close readings of all his most important poems - from the shortest epigram to the book-length verse narrative Ludlow - the book also provides the biographical context for these works, giving an insight into a rich and varied life that has spanned three continents.

232 pages, Paperback

Published February 24, 2023

About the author

Gregory Dowling grew up in Bristol, UK. He studied English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford. He moved to Italy after graduating and has lived there since 1979, teaching in language schools in Naples, Siena, Verona and eventually Venice, where he has lived since 1981. He is now Associate Professor of American Literature at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He published four thrillers in the 1980s and 1990s and then devoted himself to academic work and translation. He returned to fiction in 2015, with his novel set in 18th-century Venice, Ascension, and the sequel The Four Horsemen in 2017 (the Alvise Marangon Mysteries).
His academic work mainly concerns British and American poetry; he has published a study of American narrative poetry, a study of the poet David Mason, a guidebook to Byron's Venice and has co-edited two anthologies of 20th-century poetry. He has also published numerous essays and articles on writers from the Romantic period to the present day. He was non-fiction editor for the magazine Able Muse for several years and is responsible for the British section of the Italian poetry magazine Semicerchio. He has also written numerous articles on Venice, and was responsible for the sightseeing pages of the first five editions of the Time Out Guide to Venice. He is on the board of the committee for a new museum in Ravenna devoted to Lord Byron, due to open in 2019.