Complete Poems brings together the published and unpublished work of one of the most significant poets of the late twentieth century, founding editor of Stand and of the Northern House imprint. As well as reprinting all the poems included in Silkin’s books (from The Portrait and Other Poems in 1950 to Making a Republic in 2002), it includes significant poems previously unpublished or published only in a wide variety of journals, and work transcribed from manuscripts. Complete Poems demands a new perception of Silkin’s language and his concerns, the breadth of his passionately humane response to war and the Holocaust, and his scrutiny of humanity alongside nature.
Jon Silkin was born in London in 1930. After National Service and time as a manual labourer, he went to the University of Leeds as Gregory Fellow in Poetry. He founded Stand magazine in 1952 and the Northern House press in 1965. His publications included nine volumes of poetry and many critical works and anthologies: Out of Battle, his study of Rosenberg, Owen and other poets of the Great War, is a critical landmark. He held writing fellowships and chairs in the United States, Australia and Japan. Jon Silkin died in November 1997.
Jon Glover was born in Sheffield in 1943 and grew up in south London. He studied English and Philosophy at the University of Leeds, where he met Jon Silkin and began a long association with Stand magazine, of which he is now Managing Editor. Jon Glover is an Honorary Fellow of the English Association, an Honorary Fellow of the School of English at the University of Leeds and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bolton, where he is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing.
Kathryn Jenner graduated with a BA and MA from the University of Leeds before working as an archivist in the university’s Brotherton Library, where she catalogued the Jon Silkin archive and the poetry and notebooks of Geoffrey Hill.
Its impossible to do justice to a driven lifetimes worth of work. Final plaudits are very much due to editors Jon Glover and Kathryn Jenner who, having painstakingly constructed such a thorough and intelligently sequenced summary of Silkins poetic output, have also managed to make a compelling case for reappraising his reputation as more than a poet of his own time. Within this comely breezeblock of post-Second World War verse, ther is much that ought to interest, inspire and concern our own faltering century. Stand Magazine
