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  • Published: 15 June 2006
  • ISBN: 9780224077934
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $32.99

The Harper




The last collection from one of the most celebrated post-war poets.

Peter Redgrove, who died in June 2003, was a friend and contemporary of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and became one of the most celebrated and prolific post-war poets - regarded by many as a true visionary.

The Harper, which gathers together his last poems, is a collection still charged with characteristic energy, eroticism and transforming imagination. Redgrove's language thrills with thunder, rain and electricity, the air heavy with perfumes and balsams, wasps and spiders - and reading these poems is uncannily like re-entering a dream. Peter Redgrove made us look at our world with fresh eyes, and he changed our perception forever.

  • Published: 15 June 2006
  • ISBN: 9780224077934
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Peter Redgrove

Peter Redgrove was born in 1932 and studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge. He was also a novelist, playwright and co-author (with Penelope Shuttle) of The Wise Wound, a revolutionary study of the human fertility cycle. Among his many awards were the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Prix Italia and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He died in 2003.

Also by Peter Redgrove

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Praise for The Harper

Redgrove's language can light up the page

Angela Carter

Redgrove is thunderously, exhilaratingly good

Adam Thorpe

He is recognised today as one of the few poets capable of sustained rapture, a heirophant of alchemical mysteries, chronicler of sexual ecstasies, witness to sensual, synaesthetic delights beyond the reach of most of us

Gerard Woodward

Redgrove's strengths are a clairvoyant creativity, glittering images and glittering risk...wonderful imaginative leaps of seeing, glancing epiphanies...or sustained surrealities which etch the surprisingness of the world

Ruth Padel

I would use the old-fashioned term 'genius' of Redgrove

Anthony Thwaite