At the Garden's Dark Edge

Anthony Thwaite’s poems are adroit. He wears traditional forms so lightly, with such wit, intelligence, and often with a sly undertone of comedy. His is a very English voice. The work can be sad and serious, when that is what the occasion calls for; but the tone manages always to affirm. I have long admired Thwaite’s work and am very happy to endorse this excellently chosen and edited selection.

~C. K. Stead, New Zealand Poet and Novelist

Although Anthony Thwaite wryly acknowledged the early influence of Philip Larkin, his own poetry developed over a long writing career in rather different ways. His range--geographical, historical and, above all, archaeological--is far greater than Larkin’s; his characteristic method is to take a particular object or occasion and to excavate it affectionately or critically (or both). Thwaite is a substantial, civilised poet: he addresses his readers with lucidity and sometimes with impish wit, as members of a shared literary community. This selection, arranged thematically rather than chronologically, is full of fascinating juxtapositions, and it includes some hitherto uncollected rarities among many of his better-known poems.

~Neil Powell, poet and literary biographer

This rich collection of poems should delight anyone who appreciates language crafted to its best advantage. Anthony Thwaite’s deft combination of sound with sense is a pleasure throughout. Thwaite again and again demonstrates how an ethical vision of all aspects of his experience can allow a poet sanely to describe his participation in the world.

~Jameela Lares, Professor Emeritus of English, The University of Southern Mississippi

'The writer makes a life from mysteries,' Anthony Thwaite believed, and it’s as an archaeologist of daily life, unearthing the mysteries of love, work, marriage, and parenthood, that he excels. He’s a collector of shards, rescuing past lives and lost civilisations, but rooting them in his own time: 'What I really want is things/To tell me what I have been.' The voice is steady, plain-speaking, resistant to extravagance, but it doesn’t shirk fear or tragedy. This exemplary selection shows Thwaite at his artful best, as he travels widely in time and place while teasing out the continuities of human experience, 'water under the bridge, still flowing on.'

~Blake Morrison, poet, novelist, and Emeritus Professor of Creative and Life Writing, Goldsmiths University, London

I've held the work of this keen and clinically observant writer in the highest regard since I first came across it. Anthony Thwaite is, as we sometimes say in my haunts and harbors, the real deal.

~Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked