Peter Redgrove

Collected Poems
- Peter Redgrove
Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003, was one of the most prolific of post-war poets and, as this Collected Poems reveals, one of the finest. A friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in the early 1950s, Redgrove was regarded by many as their equal, and his work has been championed by a wide variety of writers - from Margaret Drabble to Colin Wilson, Douglas Dunn to Seamus Heaney. Ted Hughes once wrote warmly to Redgrove of 'how important you've been to me. You've no idea how much - right from the first time we met.'

In this first Collected Poems, Neil Roberts has gathered together the best poems from twenty-six volumes of verse - from The Collector (1959) to the three books published posthumously. The result is an unearthed treasure trove - poems that find new and thrilling ways of celebrating the natural world and the human condition, poems that dazzle with their visual imagination, poems that show the huge range and depth of the poet's art. In Redgrove's poetry there is a unique melding of the erotic, the terrifying, the playful, the strange, and the strangely familiar; his originality and energy is unparalleled in our time and his work was the work of a true visionary.

From The Virgil Caverns

Peter Redgrove

Selected Poems

Peter Redgrove

My Father's Trapdoor

Peter Redgrove

Neil Roberts was born in Manchester and educated in Latymer Upper School, London, and Clare College, Cambridge. He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, where he has taught for thirty-eight years. He wrote the first critical study of Peter Redgrove, The Lover, the Dreamer and the World, and knew the poet well during the last twenty years of his life. His other books include Ted Hughes: A Literary Life, and works on D. H. Lawrence, George Eliot and George Meredith. He lives in Derbyshire. Peter Redgrove was born in 1932 and studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge. He was also a novelist, playwright and co-author (with Penelope Shuttle) of The Wise Wound, a revolutionary study of the human fertility cycle. Among his many awards were the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Prix Italia and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He died in 2003.