Collected Poems

Poetry. A major event, this volume is the first career-spanning collection of Lee Harwood's work, and its publication was timed to coincide with the author's 65th birthday in June 2004. Most of Lee Harwood's previous work is out of print, including the large-scale Selected Poems (crossing the frozen river) published by Paladin in the late 1980s, and this Collected makes all of it available again, including some hard-to-find material and some more recent uncollected work. "He makes use of avant-garde poetic techniques not to dramatise a radical scepticism about language or meaning, but in order to recover for poetry the kinds of 'directness' or expressive energy postmodernism has taught us to distrust. And if his loose, airy structures, his occasioanl use of ideograms and his fractured syntax suggest that his oeuvre will be undertaking some acute invetigation of uncetainty or anxiety, its overall impact is in fact just the opposite: his best work is fresh, vivid and confident, infused with a

Lee Harwood was born in 1939 and grew up in Surrey. He has spent the majority of the past 35 years living in Brighton. In a writing career that began in the early 1960s he has published over 20 volumes of poetry and prose, as well as translations of Tristan Tzara. His work has been widely anthologised and he is widely regarded as one of the finest poets working in England today.