Collected Poems and Translations

Wells Robert

Robert Wells writes poems of memory, a memory so intense it conjures places, objects and desires with their original force and freshness. The high points of a life are celebrated, and personal memories and the common memories of a culture are brought together.

This collection of poetry and translations draws together the threads of his work in eight linked sections of sensuous evocation. There are poems set on the coast of Exmoor and in the hill country of central Italy; some concerned with erotic friendship, with travel and landscape. In the final two sections, his celebrated translations of Virgil's Georgics and the "Idylls of Theocritus" fuse lived experience with a deep knowledge of the original texts.

Reviews

"Robert Wells's language is exact, the experience of the poem is deeply gone through, there is a constant desire to adhere to the truth as he apprehended it rather than to glamorize it. The inexpressible becomes expressed. At one point I started marking my favourite poems, but I like so many of them that I gave up" – Thom Gunn

"Wells is a quiet poet... he inherits the tender, threatening profundity of Edward Thomas" – Anne Stevenson

"Robert Wells understands how finely man and nature are moulded to each other... The healing loneliness of hills and waters, and the solitary figures who move among them – bathers, wood-cutters, hay harvesters – are the setting and characters of Wells's poems" – George Mackay Brown

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