Complete Poetry

This collection brings together the published and unpublished work of one of the most significant poets of the late 20th century: founding editor of Stand magazine and the Northern House imprint, Jon Silkin. All the poems from Silkin’s books—from The Portrait and Other Poems in 1950 to Making a Republic in 2002—are included, as are significant poems that were previously unpublished or published only in a variety of journals, and work transcribed from manuscripts. Complete Poetry 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 a Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds. 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. He held writing fellowships and chairs in the United States, Australia, and Japan. Jon Glover is the managing editor of Stand magazine and is a research professor at the University of Bolton. He is the author of two books of poetry, Glass Is Elastic and Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and edited The Penguin Book of First World War Prose with Jon Silkin. Kathryn Jenner has worked as an archivist at the University of Leeds’s Brotherton Library, where she catalogued the Jon Silkin archive and the poetry and notebooks of Geoffrey Hill.