Joy in the Morning is John Whitworth’s twelfth book of poems. The first was published in 1984 and he has been putting them out at pretty regular intervals since then from various publishers, Secker, Peterloo, Hodder, Enitharmon and now from Karen Kelsay’s Kelsay Books.
He is particularly pleased when poets he admires praise his books. Gavin Ewart found his poems ‘both touching and tender’; Peter Reading liked his ‘witty, urbane, entertaining and infallibly precise verse’; Dick Davis thinks him ‘a sort of male Wendy Cope … but more robust and contemptuous’; Wendy Cope was robustly instrumental in giving him a Cholmondeley Award in 1996; Peter Porter thought that ‘with him the virtuosity of light verse can seem close to high art’; Anthony Thwaite characterised him as ‘by Kingsley Amis out of Gavin Ewart, sexy, demotic, rumbustuous yet formal … the Amis tone comes from Death peering through the randy contrivances, and the Ewart from the elaborate versification … it works … you feel you have met an original personality’; Philip Larkin said nice things in The Obsever, though what exactly they were, Whitworth cannot now remember. George Mackay Brown spoke of ‘stanza forms as lively and resounding as Kipling’; and, perhaps best of all, Les Murray, who, as Literary Editor of Quadrant, has published so many of Whitworth’s poems, has characterised them as ‘as smart and as full of fun as a pair of glazed tap shoes’ and Whitworth as ‘a wise and rueful virtuoso’.
John Whitworth thinks this is his best book yet (well I suppose he would, wouldn’t he?) It is certainly his longest. You get an awful lot of poems for your money, and every one of them has been published somewhere else first. So put your money down and make both poet and publisher happy!
Whitworth also published Writing Poetry (A & C Black) which tells you just what it says it does.
