Peter Levi's final collection contains the moving lyrics he composed, often while walking round the green in the Gloucestershire village where he lived, as well as other poems written since "Reed Music" (1997). Despite his increasing blindness, his p...

"Reed Music" is Peter Levi's first collection of completely new work since "Shadow and Bone" (1989). In these exhilarating poems he combines a watercolourist's gift for the spontaneous evocation of a scene with a very different gift for formal elegy....

"The Rags of Time" adds recent poems written on the deaths of two poets, Nikos Gatsos and Constantine Trypanis, and the sculptor Elisabeth Frink to the six laments included in "The Echoing Green" (1983) and "Shakespeare's Birthday" (1985). These sust...

"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 collecti...

The lamentation of the dead has been a preoccupation in Peter Levi's recent poetry, as well as the subject of his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1984. Few poets of our time have found ways in which to compose such sustained medita...

"Most of what there is to learn about poetry has to be learnt in one's own language. But it is mostly learnt by reading and turning over poems in one's head, and little by deliberate criticism". Peter Levi's essay – meditated, as he says in his prefa...

Peter Levi's inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford discusses the lamentation of the dead in written and oral poetry from Homer and the Bible to recent times, by way of Shakespeare, Milton and the Serbian epics. He puts...

Peter Levi's first book since "Collected Poems 1955-1975" contains his poems written between spring 1975 and winter 1977. Of his "Collected Poems 1955-1975", John Heath-Stubbs wrote in The Tablet: "His is certainly one of the most authentic and origi...

This volume brings together Peter Levi's early books, pamphlets and other uncollected poems written over a period of twenty years to 1975. His subsequent books of poetry are "Five Ages" (1978), "Private Ground" (1981), "The Echoing Green" (1983), "Th...