Shadow and Bone

Poems 1981-1988

Levi Peter

"Shadow and Bone" is Peter Levi's first collection of poems since "Private Ground" (1981), apart from two small books of "lamentations" – formal elegies for friends – "The Echoing Green" and "Shakespeare's Birthday". It is a rich and diverse collection, varied in subject and verse-forms. There are sequences about railway posters and America, poems for friends and fellow scholars or poets, poems about marriage and the natural world, epigrams, a magnificent long poem on the meaning of Christmas, and meditative lyrics.

About the Author

Peter Levi (1931-2000) was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1984. Until 1977 he was a Jesuit priest. He was a classicist whose writing includes three uncategorizable books – on modern Greece, Afghanistan, and the English landscape – as well as translations, critical and scholarly works, a thriller and many collections of poems.

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