Ivor S Poetry

Ivor's Poetry is a feast of poetry covering many subjects including fantasy, trips within one's mind, spirituality and life's experiences with an ever present message of having fun, enjoying life and making the most of the hand life dealt you to travel the pathways of life. It is coloured by his being brought up in a large military family, his teenage years living on the island of Penang in Malaysia and the trials and successes he has encountered throughout his lifetime. Avenues of the mind, depression, laughter, death, disability, religion and spirituality are all unfolded here in a most surprisingly entertaining fashion. The clear message of having fun whilst rising from the ashes of depression, redundancy and personal loss have never before been presented in such a personal and open manner that makes one feel that just reading his work could guide you towards one's own personal fulfillment.

The first comprehensive biography of an extraordinary English poet and composer whose life was haunted by fighting in the First World War and, later, confinement in a mental asylum Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) wrote some of the most anthologized poems of the First World War and composed some of the greatest works in the English song repertoire, such as “Sleep.” Yet his life was shadowed by the trauma of the war and mental illness, and he spent his last fifteen years confined to a mental asylum. In Dweller in Shadows, Kate Kennedy presents the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary and misunderstood artist. A promising student at the Royal College of Music, Gurney enlisted as a private with the Gloucestershire regiment in 1915 and spent two years in the trenches of the Western Front. Wounded in the arm and subsequently gassed during the Battle of Passchendaele, Gurney was recovering in hospital when his first collection of poems, Severn and Somme, was published. Despite episodes of depression, he resumed his music studies after the war until he was committed to an asylum in 1922. At times believing he was Shakespeare and that the “machines under the floor” were torturing him, he nevertheless continued to write and compose, leaving behind a vast body of unpublished work when he died of tuberculosis. Drawing on extensive archival research and spanning literary criticism, history, psychiatry and musicology, this compelling narrative sets Gurney’s life and work against the backdrop of the war and his institutionalisation, probing the links between madness, suffering and creativity. Facing death in the trenches, Gurney hoped that history might not “forget me quite.” This definitive account of his life and work helps ensure that he will indeed be remembered.

Ivor's Ramblings is a feast of poetry covering many subjects including fantasy, trips within one's mind, spirituality and life's experiences with an ever present message of having fun, enjoying life and making the most of the hand life dealt you to travel the pathways of life. It is coloured by his being brought up in a large military family, his teenage years living on the island of Penang in Malaysia and the trials and successes he has encountered throughout his lifetime. Avenues of the mind, depression, laughter, death, disability, religion and spirituality are all unfolded here in a most surprisingly entertaining fashion. The clear message of having fun whilst rising from the ashes of depression, redundancy and personal loss have never before been presented in such a personal and open manner that makes one feel that just reading his work could guide you towards one's own personal fulfilment.

Designed and illustrated by Michael Christopher Caine, this publication is a pamphlet including a single long poem printed on pages which unfold zigzag fashion from the cover, so that the cover picture of a snake becomes the head of the snake formed from the printed columns of text.

This book attends to four poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – whose poems are remarkable for their personal directness and distinctiveness. It shows how their writing conveys a potently individual quality of feeling, perception, and experience: each poet responds with unusual commitment to the Romantic idea of art as personal expression. The book looks closely at the vitality and intricacy of the poets’ language, the personal candour of their subject matter, and their sense, obdurate but persuasive, of their own strangeness. As it traces the tact and imagination with which each of the four writers realises the possibilities of individualism in lyric, it affirms the vibrancy of their contributions to nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), considered one of the finest World War I poets, now takes his rightful place alongside the greats of English poetry. His range is wide, including the First World War, in which he served as an infantry private; passionate celebration of his native Gloucestershire; and fears of the mental imbalance which led to his eventual confinement in a mental hospital. Out of these experiences, he created poetry that is entirely unique, vigorous, musical, and direct. This selection of over 150 of his best poems, has been compiled by the poet P.J. Kavanagh from his edition of the Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney. This reissued edition offers, a few corrected readings, as well as a useful Chronology and Introduction to Gurney's life by P. J. Kavanagh.

This is the first volume in a five-volume edition of the complete poetical works of Ivor Gurney (1890-1937). Following an extensive study of all known manuscripts, the edition brings much of that work to publication for the first time. Since his death, much of his work has been censored or overlooked, his stylistic development towards modernism written off as the product of 'insanity' The availability of his complete poetry will change absolutely our understanding of Gurney's development, and the true nature of his poetry. It will lay bare his aspirations and pursuits as an artist in all its diversity, as a poet of war, of place, and of the asylum; a poet whose work has been celebrated by Geoffrey Hill for its 'incontestible grandeur'. Volume I presents all of Gurney's poems written from March 1907 to December 1918. It begins with Gurney's earliest surviving verse, and ends, just after the Armistice, with his return to civilian life.