Mark Valentine
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A Forgotten Edwardian Nonsense Poet: Norman Boothroyd
This essay is the latest in a series for Wild Court by Mark Valentine on obscure publications and poets lost to posterity, and rare books. The series can be found here. Mark Valentine In the vast emporium of the Richard Booth bookshop in Hay-on-Wye there used to be four of five high broad shelves filled to overflowing with…
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A Shilling Book from Praed Street: on Daniel George
Mark Valentine Daniel George (1890-1967) was the author of To-morrow Will Be Different (1932), a book-length narrative poem about a day in his life, getting up, bathing and shaving, going for a walk with friends, visiting the pub, then meeting at a cottage for tea. It is, as the epigraph quotation from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Notebooks…
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The Haunted Forties: Wrey Gardiner and Poetry Quarterly
Mark Valentine On the trestle table beneath the balconies and chandeliers of the Winter Gardens in the old spa town there was a run of pocket-sized poetry journals. The coats that carried a copy when it had just come out would have also contained an identity card and a ration book, probably a…
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‘The Terrific-Strange’: some student poets of 1965
Mark Valentine In 1958 a group of tutors and students at the University of North Staffordshire, Keele, published a booklet anthology entitled Universities’ Poetry One. It was a selection from submissions sent from undergraduates across the country. There were already several Oxford- and Cambridge-based poetry journals, some long-standing, but this was one…
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Devilled Almonds and Doomed Boys: some avant-garde poetry of 1920
Portrait of Edith Sitwell by Roger Fry, 1915 Mark Valentine The copy of The Wooden Pegasus (1920) by Edith Sitwell that I have is discarded from Sheffield City Library. There is a typed sticker on the front free endpaper saying she is the daughter of Sir George Reresby Sitwell of (nearby) Renishaw…