Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #217985 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Customer Reviews

The wrong edition
If you want an edition that doesn't contain more than forty poems from Larkin's maturity, then this is the one for you. If, however, you would like to be able to read what Blake Morrison called 'Larkin's last great poem' ('Love Again') or other examples that stand comparison with his best work, like 'Marriages', 'Letter to a Friend about Girls', 'Strangers', 'Autumn', 'Maturity', 'The Dance', 'Negative Indicative' etc etc, then avoid this edition at all costs. Try and get the original Collected Poems second hand, which has them all in. Otherwise you risk being socially embarrassed when someone starts talking to you about 'Gathering Wood' and you swear blind Larkin never wrote such a poem. Think of it!

P.S. It has been pointed out that this review has been posted on ALL the editions of Larkin's collected poems, which is pretty stupid and unhelpful. What is the point of listing editions separately and then posting a review aimed at one particular edition on them all? Anyway, this review is aimed at the 2003 edition, which is (I believe) the first to conatin the cuts. Anything before that date should be OK (UK & US editions). There are plenty available, I urge you to buy them and avoid missing out on some superb poems.

Doubtful edition of good book
No edition of Larkin's poems could ever be a waste of paper, and anybody without them should buy at once: but please note that this is not the 1980s edition of the same name, and has been cut. It has the same title and editor, and looks like the same book - indeed its blurb is the same - but many of his juvenile poems are omitted and the arrangement is no longer chronological. Given that Larkin spent his adult life as a university librarian, it seems ironic that his Collected will be the source of endless confusion and misidentification in future catalogues. Faber have done him a pointless disservice by this new version, and another by not identifying it as such. But I can only bear to knock one star off the total.

Glimpses of joy more poigniant for the fear and despair
...Tritely characterised as a misanthrope and a curmudgeon the poems of his cannon are full of intense beauty and moments of potently alluring melancholy wholly at odds with the image. It is often claimed that Larkin wrote only 4 great poems - Here, Dockery and Son, Aubade, The Witsun Weddings - This collection underlines the absurdity of this view - In poems like Church Going, Arundel Tomb and Show Saturday we find a poet who resolves the seemingly mundane into conclusion whose optimism and joy are all the more intense for being reasoned to rather than asserted. His deeply British sense of identity and location are also expressed in wonderfully comic and self-deprecating pieces such as 'I remember I remember', 'vers de societe'. Finally on death and ageing he expresses everyman's fear with a clarity that is truly chilling in its finality.

I have been reading Larkin for 15 years, the depth and power of his writing continues to amaze and delight me.