Donald Rayfield
Pro-Sex, Anti-Stalin
Collected Poems
By Robert Conquest (Edited by Elizabeth Conquest)
Waywiser Press 440pp £24.99 order from our bookshop
Few people – perhaps only Friedrich von Schiller and Alexander Pushkin – have achieved, like Robert Conquest, distinction as both historians and poets. Conquest’s reputation as a poet was highest in the mid-1940s and 1950s, when his name was spoken in conjunction with Philip Larkin’s and T S Eliot’s and he was hailed as Thomas Hardy’s heir. He achieved fame early in his career by winning a prize for the best long poem about the Second World War, ‘For the Death of a Poet’ (the poet was Drummond Allison, killed in Italy in December 1943). There is little mourning in the poem, but magnificent scene-setting, stoical reflection and virtuoso rhythmic and metrical skills. Had the poem been written in the context of the First World War, it would be classed alongside Wilfred Owen’s work and anthologised.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad