Collected Later Poems

Middleton Christopher

August Kleinzahler says, "Christopher Middleton is, and remains, a shocking man. One hardly knows where to begin..." There are few risks Middleton will not take in his poems. For six decades and more he has uncovered new dimensions in language. The last decade has been one of continuous discovery and extension. His English is an open medium, responding to Arabic, German, Spanish, French and other media. And English is eloquent in its nonsense as much as in its sense. His poems do not linger in the dank alleyways of self: he is always a maker and a shaper, of things that become durable resources for the reader, that refine and extend how we think, see and feel through formed language.

About the Author

Christopher Middleton, born in Cornwall in 1926, is a poet and translator, especially of German literature. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and held academic positions at the University of Zurich and King's College London before becoming Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He retired in 1998. His "Collected Poems" appeared in 2008.

Reviews

"Poems, translations, essays – Christopher Middleton's are among the most visited books on my shelves; always dependable for re-exciting the possibilities of language" – Jennie Feldman

"The poet's ancestry, his Englishness, is relegated without denial. But the movement, whether it is generated in America, Provence or Cappadocia, is always of encounter... if an eroticism, with the inner and the outer, a profound in-touchness with the multiplicities of existence... a mark of all important poets" – Tom Lowenstein

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