Dear Mairead,
There is an interesting piece by John Wilkinson on Clere Parsons in The
Cambridge Quarterly 23.4 (1994), 348-57; and he also mentions Parsons in his
review of Keith Tuma's Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish
Poetry, again in The Cambridge Quarterly 31.1 (2002), which praises Parsons
inclusion thus: 'Here, in poems written during the early 1930s, was a turn
not taken (Parsons died at the age of 23) which connects back to the
sprightly Mina Loy writing in the 1920s, and forward to little enough in
British and Irish poetry - perhaps to the younger Black Mountain poets in
the United States during the mid-1950s, with the delicacy of lyrics by
Edward Dorn and John Wieners'?
Parsons also gets a brief mention in C. H. Sisson's English Poetry
1900-1950: An Assessment, where he is described as having 'a clarity and
elegance which is not exactly like anyone else's work ... The lines sing and
there is a quality about them at once airy and metallic'.
Best wishes
Sam
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