The Poems of Martin Seymour-Smith

Poems by Martin Seymour-Smith Format: Hardback Pages: 336 Publication: June 2014 ISBN: 9780957466951 Martin Seymour-Smith (1928–1998) was in the line of English poetry that includes Thomas Hardy and Robert Graves – two poets whose biographies he wrote (he had known Graves since the age of fourteen, and revered Hardy). His massive Guide to Modern World Literature included many original translations, several of which are collected here for the first time. He was a proponent of a phenomenological poetry rooted in experience, and an advocate of such experimental foreign-language poets as the Peruvian César Vallejo. Few poems of this age are simultaneously as intelligent and passionate as these. Found on a Building Site ‘Dear One: I am naked on a building site In Penge West. It is 1.5 a.m., and cold; The mist wreathes around me, rising in columns. I shall have much to think of, but chiefly What shall I do at dawn? I am writing this with a piece of coal On a sheet of a tramp’s stained newspaper … Dum spiro spero: perhaps you will find this Before the gaunt sirens of daybreak speak. If not, then think of me, but make no enquiries.’ Thus sometimes the poor spirit. Martin Seymour-Smith Writer, soldier, bantam-weight boxer, encyclopaedist, father, friend, tormented and ecstatic lover – Seymour-Smith possessed one of the most distinctive poetic voices of his time. Born in London and educated at Highgate School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Seymour-Smith was close to Robert Graves and tutored Graves’s son William in Mallorca. As well as a biographer, he was a brilliant critic – the Samuel Johnson of his day, according to Anthony Burgess. For younger poets, he points a way to go that is beyond the usual territories mapped out by Modernism and tradition. Introduction to The Poems of Martin Seymour-Smith