"In Darkness Inside Out" Rodney Pybus takes the reader on a series of excursions within real and imagined, beautiful and barbaric worlds. From Suffolk to Cape Town, from comedy to elegy, Pybus's poems explore the collusions of language and memory, the layerings of time and loss. A sequence set in the new South Africa closes this absorbing collection. Pybus shows that it is finally the work of the imagination that best turns darkness inside out.
About the Author
Rodney Pybus was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1938 and educated at Cambridge, where he read Classics and English. In the 1960s and 1970s he worked in the north-east of England as a newspaper journalist and a writer-producer in television, specialising in documentary films, and arts and education programmes. He was a Lecturer in Mass Communication in the School of English & Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 1976-1979.
After working for Northern Arts in Cumbria and the Lake District, he moved in 1983 to Suffolk, where he still lives. He has taught creative writing at all levels of education from primary schools to universities and adult education, and English Literature and Media Studies to A level students.
He was for many years a co-editor of the literary quarterly "Stand" (founded by the poet Jon Silkin in 1952), and has given readings of his poetry widely in Britain, and also in Ireland, France, South Africa, Australia and the Canary Isles. His writing has appeared in the United States, Australia, Russia, Denmark, Spain and France, and been translated into French, Spanish, Russian, Czech, German and Romanian. He has travelled widely in Europe, and in South Africa, in which he has a special interest.
Awards and prizes include a Hawthornden Fellowship; Arts Council of Great Britain Writer's Fellowships in Suffolk and Cambridge; The Poetry Society's Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize; Society of Authors travel grant; 1st prize, Peterloo International Poetry Competition; major prizes in the National Poetry Competition and the Arvon International Poetry Competition.
Reviews
"So pure and sinuous and all of a piece... Wonderfully graceful... words that seem natural and moving at the mind's speed – like improvisation but everything spot on" – Ted Hughes
