Charles Tomlinson's "New Collected Poems" gathers a lifetime's work, from the 1950s to 2006. A poet deeply responsive to English landscape, grounded in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Tomlinson is also a writer of international renown, with wide-ranging interests in European and American poets, many of whom he has edited and translated. "Collected Poems" is an enriching journey across continents and literatures, friendships, collaborations and experiments, always with an eye keen for new places and possibilities. Tomlinson's poetry is witty and luminous, marked by precise observation and language, alert to surfaces and depths, to the local and the universal.
Charles Tomlinson was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1927. He studied at Cambridge with Donald Davie and taught at the University of Bristol from 1957 until his retirement. He has published many collections of poetry as well as volumes of criticism and translation, and has edited the Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (1980). His poetry has won international recognition and has received many prizes in Europe and the United States, including the 1993 Bennett Award from the Hudson Review; the New Criterion Poetry Prize, 2002; the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Ennio Flaiano, 2001; and the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Attilio Bertolucci, 2004. He is an honorary fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and of the Modern Language Association. Charles Tomlinson was made a CBE for his contribution to literature in 2001.
'Tomlinson insists, and he has a right to insist, that he is as authentic a voice of modern Britain as Larkin is - Only in the great poets is content so intimately married to form'. - Donald Davie 'Against the word as spectacle, Tomlinson opposes the concept - a very English one - of the world as event - He is fascinated - with his eyes open: a lucid fascination - by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things'. - Octavio Paz 'He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life'. - William Carlos Williams. 'Tomlinson, born in 1927, is a unique voice in contemporary English poetry, and has been a satellite of excellence for the past 50 years' David Morley, Guardian. 'Few poets are as natural or as exact as Charles Tomlinson - it's as if all his experience is waiting to be trapped'. Matthew Sweeney, Observer.
