Collected Poems

Collected Poems contains the previously published poetry of Rowan Williams, together with a significant body of new work. Also included are his celebrated translations from Welsh, German, and Russian poetry. His earlier collections have included pieces prompted by the landscape and literature of West Wales, and a sequence of poems on the varieties of love in the plays of Shakespeare. This Collected adds a sequence commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan disaster, tributes to writers as different as Alan Garner and John Milton, and a reflection on sculptures by Antony Gormley. The book reflects the poet's wide range of interest and the variety of poetic mediums he has explored. His poems continue to respond vividly to the visual arts, and to the experience and imagination of 'pre-modern' cultures, as well as to the crises and tragedies of our time. He continues to read with uncanny clarity the signs that are manifest in nature and history. Imagination working through language brings us as close as we can get to our condition. 'I dislike the idea of being a religious poet,' he says. 'I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely.'

Rowan Williams was born in 1950. He was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury (2002–2012). He spent much of his earlier career as an academic at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford successively. Williams stood down as Archbishop of Canterbury on 31 December 2012 and became Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University in January 2013 retiring in 2020. Carcanet reissued The Poems of Rowan Williams in April 2014.