New edition with audio
Frances Horovitz’s poems have the clarity of ballad and the power of myth. Her finely honed lyrics 'strike to areas of the soul as old as humanity itself'. Many were inspired by the remote Cotswold valley where she lived for ten years; others by the border country of Cumbria and the Welsh Marches.
Her posthumous Collected Poems (1985) was one of the landmark volumes of postwar British poetry. She was one of the finest ever readers of poetry, and this new edition includes an recording from 1982 of her reading a selection of her poems, along with an interview – on a CD included with the paperback edition and as audio files accompanying the poems in the e-book with audio.
'She has perfect rhythm, great delicacy and a rather Chinese yet very locally British sense of landscape…her poetry does seem to me to approach greatness.' - Peter Levi.
'They drop like clear crystals into whatever cave of existence we share with darkness, and there set the deepest chambers echoing… Frances Horovitz inherits the mantle of Kathleen Raine and of Frances Bellerby. It is an honour to be able to say that her voice is not that of the ‘age’ but of the earth.’ – Anne Stevenson. Poetry Review
'The Collected Poems are, after all, what we are left with when all the symposia and elegies have withered. One is reminded, gratefully, of John Updike’s appreciation of Wallace Stevens: “What a good use of life, to leave behind one beautiful book”.’ – James Wood, The Times.
