William Plomer: Selected Poems, edited by Neilson Mackay

By turns lyrical, amatory, satirical and dramatic, William Plomer addresses his favourite subjects - Africa, the divided self, aesthetic pleasure, the macabre and the absurd - with a formal assurance, bleak wit and urgency of feeling. This rich and thorough selection presents, for the first time in almost fifty years, Plomer?s best.

"Neilson MacKay has performed a welcome rescue operation on the unjustly forgotten William Plomer, novelist, librettist, and (above all) poet of decorous wistfulness and cunning, understated mastery. MacKay's introduction is itself a masterpiece of literary placement and his intelligent selection of Plomer's work will go far in assuring this twentieth-century master his rightful place in the canon." - Roger Kimball, editor & publisher, The New Criterion