Swimming Chenango Lake Selected Poems

William Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson’s poetry: ‘He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.’ Of all the poets of his generation, Charles Tomlinson was most alert to English and translated poetry from other worlds. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz admired how he saw ‘the world as event... He is fascinated—with his eyes open: a lucid fascination—by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things.’ Tomlinson’s take on the world is sensuous; it is also deeply thoughtful, even metaphysical. He spoke of ‘sensuous cerebration’ as a way of being in the world. His poems are always experimenting with impression and expression. This dynamic selection, edited by the poet and Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley, presents Tomlinson to a new generation of readers.

David Morley is an ecologist, naturalist, and poet whose work has won 14 awards and prizes, including the Templar Poetry Prize, the Poetry Business Competition, and an Arts Council of England Writer’s Award. He is also known for his pioneering ecological poetry installations within natural landscapes and for the creation of "slow poetry" sculptures and I-Cast poetry films. He currently teaches at the University of Warwick.

Charles Tomlinson was born in Stoke on Trent in 1927. He studied at Cambridge with Donald Davie and taught at the University of Bristol from 1956 until his retirement. He published many collections of poetry as well as volumes of criticism and translation, and edited the Oxford Book of Verse in Translation (1980). His poetry won international recognition and received many prizes in Europe and the United States, including the 1993 Bennett Award from the Hudson Review; the New Criterion Poetry Prize, 2002; the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Ennio Flaiano, 2001; and the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Attilio Bertolucci, 2004. He was an Honorary Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, and of the Modern Language Association. Charles Tomlinson was made a CBE in 2001 for his contribution to literature. He died in 2015.