Larkin, Philip – The Bell Bookshop

Philip Larkin – Letters Home

Emma — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Letters Home gives access to the last major archive of Larkin’s writing to remain unpublished: the letters to members of his family. These correspondences help tell the story of how Larkin came to be the writer and the man he was: to his father Sydney, a ‘conservative anarchist’ and admirer of Hitler, who died relatively early in Larkin’s life; to his timid, depressive mother Eva, who by contrast lived long, and whose final years were shadowed by dementia; and to his sister Kitty, the sparse surviving fragment of whose correspondence with her brother gives an enigmatic glimpse of a complex and intimate relationship. In particular, it was the years during which he and his sister looked after their mother that shaped the writer we know so well: a number of poems written over this time are for her, and the mood of pain, shadow and despondency that characterises his later verse draws its strength from his experience of the long, lonely years of her senility. One surprising element in the volume, however, is the joie de vivre shown in the large number of witty and engaging drawings of himself and Eva, as ‘Young Creature’ and ‘Old Creature’, with which he enlivens his letters throughout the three decades of her widowhood.

This important edition, meticulously edited by James Booth is a key piece of scholarship that completes the portrait of this most cherished of English poets.

Whitsun Weddings

Emma — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The most cherished of poets, Philip Larkin is a writer with an unrivalled ability to touch readers with his evocations of English life. The Whitsun Weddings, his first volume with Faber and Faber, was published in 1964. This Faber Modern Classics edition includes a foreword by Alan Johnson MP.

‘Larkin, with his (in the best sense) provincial eye, and his unparalleled ear, is the supreme writer of post-war England.’ Telegraph
‘Larkin’s originality is palpable . . . Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never ‘depressing’.’ Martin Amis

Girl In Winter

Emma — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Lose yourself in this tale of young love by the ‘best-loved English poet of the past 100 years.’ (Sunday Times)

Katherine Lind is a refugee who has become a librarian in a wartime Northern town. One winter’s day, she receives a telegram: and her thoughts drift back to falling in love with her pen-pal, Robin Fennel, on a glorious summer exchange. But on his return from the army, their reunion is not what they imagined …

‘Beautiful.’ Nina Stibbe
‘Remarkable . Diffused poetry.’ Simon Garfield
‘Highly sensitive . Reminiscent of Virginia Woolf.’ Joyce Carol Oates
‘Funny and profoundly sad.’ Andrew Motion
‘Strange and beautiful … Short, intense and obsessed with the tiny ballets of social interaction, they could only have been written by someone very young (the writer they most remind me of is Sally Rooney) … Weird but brilliant … Zingily contemporary.’ Sunday Times

Jill

Emma — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Michaelmas term, 1940. 18-year-old John Kemp has come down from Lancashire to Oxford University to begin his scholarship studying English. But when he invents an imaginary sister to win the attention of a rich but unreliable ‘friend’, and then falls in love for real, undergraduate life becomes its own strange world .

‘Absolutely contemporary – perhaps even prophetic.’ Joyce Carol Oates
‘Remarkable . A book about innocence.’ Simon Garfield
‘A cryptic literary manifesto [about] discovering a literary personality, and the consolation art can provide.’ Andrew Motion

Collected Poems Larkin

Emma — Mon, 17 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Since its publication in 1988, Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems has become essential reading on any poetry bookshelf. This new edition returns to Larkin’s own deliberate ordering of his poems, presenting, in their original sequence, his four published books: The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. It also includes an appendix of poems that Larkin published in other places, from his juvenilia to his final years – some of which might have appeared in a late book, if he had lived.

Preserving everything that he published in his lifetime, this new Collected Poems returns the reader to the book Larkin might have intended: it is, for the first time, Larkin’s ‘own’ collected poems.

Whitsun Weddings

Emma — Tue, 08 May 2001 00:00:00 +0000

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) remains England’s best-loved poet – a writer matchlessly capable of evoking his native land and of touching all readers from the most sophisticated intellectual to the proverbial common reader. The late John Betjeman observed that ‘this tenderly observant poet writes clearly, rhythmically, and thoughtfully about what all of us can understand’. Behind this modest description lies a poet who made greatness look, in Milton’s prescription, ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’.

This collection, first published in 1967, contains many of his best-loved poems, including The Whitsun Weddings, An Arundel Tomb, Days, Mr Bleaney and MCMXIV.

Oxford Book Of 20th Cent English Verse

Emma — Thu, 29 Mar 1973 00:00:00 +0000

Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse provoked controversy and dispute on first publication in 1973. Warmly welcomed by fellow poets John Betjeman and W.H. Auden, it was also considered a quirky and idiosyncratic collection by some critics. Today it is recognized as a fine and wide-ranging selection of modern verse, valuable not least because it reflects the tastes of one of the best, and best-loved, English poets of the twentiethcentury. As the successor to W.B. Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935, this anthology made a radical re-assessment of the century’s achievement in poetry; it represented verse that was `lighter in tone, more understated, more casual, more conversational, more colloquial, in a way more democratic and more domestic than it was for Yeats’. It also introduced many little-known poets whose names have not entered the canon, and whose contributions add colour and depth to the anthology. AsPhilip Larkin writes in his Preface, in choosing poems rather than individuals he has brought together `poems that will give pleasure to their readers both separately and as a collection’. For this latest reissue, the poet’s biographer Andrew Motion has written a new Foreword in which he considers the nature of Larkin as editor.