An original collection of the best and most provocative work by Scottish poet W.S. Graham, the celebrated author of "Nightfishing" and Malcolm Mooney's Land. “Does it disturb the language?” the Scottish poet W. S. Graham liked to ask about a poem. Graham’s do—strangely, comically, beautifully. His career fell into two parts. The early work is rapt and wild and incantatory, and culminates in the tour de force of 1955, The Nightfishing. Fifteen years of silence were then followed by an extraordinary late flowering: Graham’s poems became stark, quizzical, and unsettling, a continual teasing examination of thought and feeling that is also an ongoing investigation into the nature and power of poetry, work that is at once metaphysical and intimate, wry and elegiac. In these late poems, Graham emerges as one of the true originals of poetry in English.
Author
William Sydney Graham was a Scottish poet who was often associated with Dylan Thomas and the neo-romantic group of poets. Graham's poetry was mostly overlooked in his lifetime; however, partly thanks to the support of Harold Pinter, his work was eventually acknowledged. He was represented in the second edition of the Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1962) and the Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001). Graham left school to become an apprentice draughtsman and then studied structural engineering at Stow College, Glasgow. He was awarded a bursary to study literature for a year at Newbattle Abbey College in 1938. Graham spent the war years working at a number of jobs in Scotland and Ireland before moving to Cornwall in 1944. His first book, Cage Without Grievance was published in 1942. The 1940s were prolific years for Graham, and he published four more books during that decade. These were The Seven Journeys (1944), 2ND Poems (1945), The Voyages of Alfred Wallis (1948) and The White Threshold (1949).
