Philip Larkin

When Philip Larkins High Windows first appeared, Kingsley Amis spoke for a large and loyal readership when he wrote: Larkins admirers need only be told that he is as good as ever here, if not slightly better.Like Betjeman and Hardy, Larkin is a poet who can move a large audience - without betraying the highest artistic standards.The poems in High Windows illustrate Larkins unrivalled ability to bring lyrical expression to ordinary, urban lives. It is a gift that makes him one of the most truly popular of the twentieth centurys poets.

Durante los primeros años de la II Guerra Mundial, John Kemp, un joven estudiante de clase humilde, llega desde un pequeño núcleo de provincias a la ciudad universitaria donde cursará sus estudios. En medio de un ambiente lugubre, deprimido y profundamente intimidatorio elegira, como salvoconducto emocional, a una chica anonima sobre la que dibujara una identidad alternativa, y la bautizara con el nombre de Jill. A partir de ese momento, comenzara el movimiento feroz de una espiral obsesiva sobre ella hasta que los acontecimientos experimentan un giro sorpresivo que pondran al protagonista contra las cuerdas. Su vida y sus aspiraciones, asi como sus deseos y anhelos daran paso a un relato poetico y grandioso de la mano de uno de los maestros de la literatura inglesa del siglo XX.

Jill es la primera y quizá más conocida novela de Philip Larkin. Considerada una de las grandes obras de la sociedad inglesa de los años cuarenta su crueldad tan en detalle, así como su belleza implacable no han dejado de seducir a las distintas generaciones que se han acercado a ella. Durante los primeros años de la II Guerra Mundial, John Kemp, un joven estudiante de clase humilde, llega desde un pequeño nucleo de provincias a la ciudad universitaria donde cursara sus estudios. En medio de un ambiente lugubre, deprimido y profundamente intimidatorio elegira, como salvoconducto emocional, a una chica anonima sobre la que dibujara una identidad alternativa, y la bautizara con el nombre de Jill. A partir de ese momento, comenzara el movimiento feroz de una espiral obsesiva sobre ella hasta que los acontecimientos experimentan un giro sorpresivo que pondran al protagonista contra las cuerdas. Su vida y sus aspiraciones, asi como sus deseos y anhelos daran paso a un relato poetico y grandioso de uno de los maestros de la literatura inglesa de los años cincuenta.

"The Sunday Sessions" consists of twenty-six poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980 - reportedly, each on a Sunday, after lunch with John Weeks, a sound engineer and colleague of the poet. The tapes, which contain work from Larkin''s first major collection, "The North Ship", as well as poems from his best-known collections, "The Whitsun Weddings" and "High Windows", remained ''lost'' for over two decades, lying on a shelf in the garage in which they were recorded. Since their rediscovery they have been the subject of widespread media attention, including a BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour documentary. Their contents are here published in full for the first time. The running time is approx 1 hour/1 disc.

Philip Larkins second collection, The Less Deceived was published by The Marvell Press in 1955, and now appears for the first time in Faber covers.The eye can hardly pick them out From the cold shade they shelter in, Till wind distresses tail and mane; Then one crops grass, and moves about - The other seeming to look on - And stands anonymous again.fromAt Grass

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

The appearance of Philip Larkins second prose collection - reviews and critical assessments of writers and writing; pieces on jazz, mostly uncollected; some long, revealing and often highly entertaining interviews given on various occasions - was a considerable literary event. Stamped by wit, originality and intelligence, it was vintage Larkin throughout:Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.I see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than as an affair of company diversified by solitude.Q.How did you arrive upon the image of a toad for work or labour?A.Sheer genius.

For the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkins four collections and on his uncollected poems. Chosen by Martin Amis.Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh - or, in that curious phrase, "laugh out loud" (as if theres another way of doing it)? 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?... Larkin, often, is more than memorable: he is instantly unforgettable. - Martin Amis

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 winters 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 StibbeRemarkable . Diffused poetry.Simon GarfieldHighly sensitive . Reminiscent of Virginia Woolf.Joyce Carol OatesFunny and profoundly sad.Andrew MotionStrange 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

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, complex world .The best-loved English poet of the past 100 years.Sunday TimesAbsolutely contemporary - perhaps even prophetic.Joyce Carol OatesRemarkable . A book about innocence.Simon GarfieldA cryptic literary manifesto [about] discovering a literary personality, and the consolation art can provide.Andrew Motion

The North Ship, Philip Larkins earliest volume of verse, was first published in August 1945. The introduction, by Larkin himself, explains the circumstances of its publication and the influences whic

This entirely new edition brings together all of Philip Larkins poems. In addition to those in Collected Poems (1988), and in the Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), some unpublished pieces from Larkins typescripts and workbooks are included, as well as verse (by turns scurrilous, satirical, affectionate, and sentimental) tucked away in his letters. The manuscript and printed sources have been scrutinized afresh; more detailed accounts than hitherto available of the sources of the text and of dates of composition are provided; and previous accounts of composition dates have been corrected. Variant wordings from Larkins typescripts and the early printings are recorded.For the first time, the poems are given a comprehensive commentary. This draws critically upon, and substantially extends, the accumulated scholarship on Larkin, and covers closely relevant historical contexts, persons and places, allusions and echoes, and linguistic usage. Due prominence is given to the poets comments on his poems, which often outline the circumstances that gave rise to a poem, or state what he was trying to achieve. Larkin played down his literariness, but his poetry enrichingly alludes to and echoes the writings of many others; Archie Burnetts commentary establishes him as a more complex and more literary poet than many readers have suspected.

Philip Larkin met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in autumn 1946, when they were both twenty-four; he was the newly-appointed assistant librarian and she was an English lecturer. In 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns his correspondent, lover and closest confidante, in a relationship which lasted over forty years until the poets death in 1985.This remarkable unpublished correspondence only came to light after Monica Joness death in 2001, and consists of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, which chronicle - day by day, sometimes hour by hour - every aspect of Larkins life and the convolutions of their relationship.

Letters Home gives access to the last major archive of Larkins 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 Larkins 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- But it was the years during which he and his sister looked after their mother in particular 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 Larkins biographer, James Booth, is a key piece of scholarship that completes the portrait of this most cherished of English poets.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) remains Englands 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 Miltons 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.