The Magic Door

Poetry. THE MAGIC DOOR is the long-awaited collected edition of Chris Torrance’s life work. Gathering eight books originally published between 1973 and 1996, the collection makes available and rejuvenates the work of this unjustly neglected poet, an important figure in the British Poetry Revival. THE MAGIC DOOR is a cycle, a long poem with recurring themes and images, although each volume has its own particular focus, ranging across alchemy, geology, history, myth and legend. For nearly 50 years, Torrance’s territory has been the Upper Neath Valley. Having grown up just south of London and worked in the legal profession, he chose instead the borderland of industrial South Wales and a locally renowned beauty spot: An early Christian hermit’s sacred stretch of river. Torrance’s dedication to his craft and to his natural surroundings form a unique record of the poet’s own consciousness and of his place, aware that The old ways disappear from the map. Through its own alchemy of form, research, imagination and intelligence, THE MAGIC DOOR is an investigation into time and space, and the position of the individual in such wider concerns. The time is long overdue to celebrate the integrity of Chris Torrance’s questing and night-haunted genius: the effortless precision of the farmer’s almanac, those rescued terms from alchemy and geology. And that lovely, reckless, free-flowing spill of self, as the transported poet exchanges youthful London atoms with his chosen Welsh ground. The revealed Magic Door sequence is a delirious epic of witness.–Iain Sinclair