Collected Poems

Since her first collection of poems published in 1943, Kathleen Raine has been writing a kind of mystical nature poetry all her own, a poetry immersed in the quiet air of solitude and imagination. Vita Sackville-West, writing in the Observer, spoke of her "curious purity": "Her poems are like drops of water, clear, self-contained, and sometimes iridescent with the elusive colors of mysticism". Collected Poems is the lifework of a visionary, a celebration of the miracles of nature and man's place among them. Now in her ninety-second year she has chosen this work from eleven published collections and from other uncollected and unpublished sources. The earliest poems were written in the mid-thirties, the latest in the late nineties.

Kathleen Raine was the author of twelve books of poetry, four of autobiography, and much scholarly work, particularly on Blake and Yeats. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1992 and, in 2000, was made both a CBE and a Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.