E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

This in by email from the poet and scholar Peter Riley on my recent post on Nicholas Moore : "His copyright is now owned by Cambridge University Library,  who hold a large archive of his manuscripts and typescripts. A book of  his last poems, Lacrimae Rarum is available from me (through Amazon  if people want to) at £4 plus postage -- I think the poems in that are very fine.  No one should have to pay £100 for Longings of the  Acrobats even if it is out of print; that's not a valid rare-book  price, it's the work of an Amazon Market-place Shark, of which there seem to be increasing numbers. They work on the basis of charging  enormous amounts for anything which they think is unavailable. There's a poem sequence by him in the  latest issue (no.3) of The Cambridge Literary Review -- evidence that  there is still some interest."

I am writing a chapter on Nicholas Moore .  There is very little online or in print about this most remarkable of poets - except for what Peter Riley and Mark Ford and a few others have to say.  Encyclopedia Britannica online has 150 words on him.  He was born November 16, 1918 in Cambridgeshire, and died in 1986, was a conscientious objector and 1940s poet. He worked closely with the major British poetry editors Tambimuttu and John Goodland , was the earliest English champion of Wallace Stevens , was widely respected in American poetry circles in the 40s, and by the 50s was pretty much totally persona non grata.  As Peter Riley observed in his introduction to the poet in Picador's Conductors of Chaos (the Picador before Don Paterson's differing tenure) - itself a curiously rare bird now - the poetry establishment/marketplace proved itself useless in spotting or rehabilitating talent as early as the 1960s, when it singularly failed to notice or publish Nicholas...