LARKIN, Philip; Archie BURNETT ( editor ). Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems.
LARKIN, Philip; Archie BURNETT (editor). Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 2012 8vo. Original lilac paper-covered boards lettered in silver to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by Mark Swan's ‘kid-ethic.com’, priced £40.00 to front flap; pp. xxx, 729, [9]; a fine, sharp copy, in a fine wrapper. A fine first impression of the definitive Larkin. Meticulously edited, and exhaustively annotated, by Archie Burnett (editor of the equally definitive Clarendon Housman) is anything but a dry, pedantic journey through the poems. Larkin’s four perfectly formed volumes published at the rate of one per decade, are printed here in their original order, taking up a mere 90 of 729 pages. What follows is everything else the poet left behind, published and unpublished. In his review of the volume (The Guardian, 12 January 2012), John Banville singles out the sonnet, 'And Now the Leaves Suddenly Lose Strength' and its ‘glorious evocation of autumn’ as ‘one of Larkin's finest "death" poems’, adding that ‘only a major poet could have afforded to leave such a masterpiece unpublished’. Burnett's commentary – more than half the book – offers an indispensable guide to the poems as well as a useful source of contextual, biographical, and textual information, the volume as a while establishing Larkin ‘as a more complex and more literary poet than many readers have suspected.’ SKU: 2125479