Andrew Crozier Reader

Crozier Andrew

Andrew Crozier (1943-2008) was a poet, and an energiser of poetry. A champion of work excluded from the familiar canon, he brought to the English literary landscape of the 1960s and 70s an engagement with the energies of American poetry. As a publisher and critic he helped to create a space for new voices within English poetry: for George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Roy Fisher, J. H. Prynne. His own poetry is meticulous in its attention to language, exhilarating in its inventiveness and force. Crozier wrote that, for him, "becoming a poet had to do with finding a mode for making sense of... being alive", and his writing is alive with the possibilities of language.

Ian Brinton, editor of "The Use of English" until 2011 and author of "Contemporary Poetry Since 1990", has brought together a comprehensive selection of Crozier's poetry and prose, much of it previously out of print or scattered in small press publications. Biographical and critical notes and a detailed bibliography complete this landmark edition of one of the essential figures in modern poetry.

About the Author

Andrew Crozier was born in 1943 and was educated at Dulwich College and Christ's College, Cambridge. In 1964, the same year in which he founded the Ferry Press, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the State University of New York, Buffalo, where he was taught by Charles Olson and made contact with the almost-forgotten poet Carl Rakosi, prompting Rakosi's return to writing. In 1998, Crozier published an edition of Rakosi's early poems. Crozier's first collection, "Loved Litter of Time Spent" (1967), was published while he was in the United States. On his return to England, he studied for a PhD at the University of Essex under Donald Davie, before taking up a post at the University of Sussex in 1973, where he remained until his retirement as Professor of English in 2005. He founded two journals, The English Intelligencer and the Wivenhoe Park Review, later the Park Review, while continuing to publish his own and others' poetry in Ferry Press editions. He wrote extensive literary criticism and in 1987 co-edited the influential anthology "A Various Art", published by Carcanet Press. His collected poems were published in 1985 with the title "All Where Each Is" (Allardyce, Barnett). Andrew Crozier died in 2008.

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