Changing Shape: New and Selected Poems

The poetry of Edward Lucie-Smith begins in A Tropical Childhood (1961), a rich landscape overlaid with different kinds of emotional and spiritual hunger. The poet became central to the Group, leading its sessions and experimenting with forms, in particular the dramatic monologues in Confessions and Histories (1964). With Towards Silence (1968) his poetry sought a new direction. Weary of conventional verse forms , tired of the sobriquet poet , he began experiments with poster poems, concrete verse, poetry solely for recitation. His last major collection, The Well Wishers , appeared in 1974. Since then his poems have appeared in limited editions if at all. This Selected is a return from disaffection, a careful sorting out of the valid from the invalid work in his oeuvre , and it contains a number of terse, penetrating poems of human and social comment composed in recent years. He remains a poet of the erotic and the aesthetic - it is hard to separate the terms in his work - and an historical and religious sensibility is at work.