Shearsman Books is pleased to announce the publication of
Departures - Selected Poems
by David Wevill,
ISBN 0 907562 34 5. 143pp, paperback, 8ins x 5 ins. Price £9.95 UK /
$15 USA (available from SPD)
David Wevill was born a Canadian in Japan in 1935, and was educated in
both Canada and England. He has lived in Burma and in Spain but has
made his home in Austin, Texas for the past thirty years. While
resident in England in the 1960s and 1970s, he established a
substantial reputation as a poet, publishing four volumes between 1964
and 1974. He won prizes, was represented in all the major anthologies,
and was included in the Penguin Modern Poets series before his first
full collection appeared. With his move across the Atlantic, he fell
from view in Britain, although his work continued to be published in
his native Canada. This collection is designed to redress the balance
and to bring his work before the British public once again, reprinting
work from the four books published in London, and adding to them work
from his subsequent Canadian collections. His main publications are:
Birth of a Shark (1964), A Christ of the Ice-floes (1966), Firebreak
(1971), Where the Arrow Falls (1973), Other Names for the Heart (1985),
Figure of Eight (1987), Child Eating Snow (1994), Solo With Grazing
Deer (2001). He has also published translations of Fernando Pessoa and
Ferenc Juhász. David Wevill teaches English Literature and Creative
Writing at the University of Texas, Austin.
Associated in his early career with The Group, his work appeared in A
Group Anthology before being selected for the Penguin Modern Poets
series – where he shared a volume with David Holbrook and Christopher
Middleton. Important for the development of his early work were Jungian
theory and mid-century Spanish poetry, above all García Lorca, Neruda
and Paz. As Martin Seymour-Smith observed, “The Jungian ‘search’, an
admittedly circular one, is Wevill’s main theme, and so his poetry
needs to be read in its entirety to be fully appreciated”.
Maybe a little too conservative for many subscribers to this list (&
rather more conservative than most books that I publish), but I've been
an admirer of David's work for many years and have published this
myself after fruitless attempts to persuade mainstream publishers to do
it. For the next couple of weeks, I can supply it within the UK to
members of this list for £8 including p&p. SPD already have copies in
the US.
Tony Frazer
Shearsman Books
http://www.shearsman.com/
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