The Action

Elegy turns into affirmation, 'binding the pulse / back into the body', in this new collection by Eric Gregory Award-winning poet Roger Garfitt. Roger Garfitt has published sparingly but always to good effect. The Action reveals the individual character of each poem and sequence, 'written only when the internal pressure demands and the slow pace of craft allows'. Carol Ann Duffy observed in The Guardian that 'he clearly believes, quite rightly, in the Muse and his approach has the patience of a journeyman's to his craft'. Hard-won, but not austere, the poems are marked by tenderness and passion; quiet humour rather than irony runs through them. Sean O'Brien writes, 'He is both a meticulous re-creator of, for example, the effects of light, and a sociable poet who sees place as expressive of its inhabitants... The minuteness of his attention is often rewarding... an intriguing counterpart to the more public work of Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison.'

A freelance writer ever since he won the Gregory Award in 1974, Roger Garfitt has been Poetry Critic of London Magazine, Editor of Poetry Review, Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Swansea University. He runs a Poetry Masterclass for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education at Madingley Hall. He was married to Frances Horovitz, whose Collected Poems he edited for Bloodaxe after her early death from cancer. From 1985 to 1992 he spent much of his time in Colombia and his Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2000) includes despatches that first appeared in Granta and London Review of Books. Now remarried and living in the Shropshire Hills, he performs Poetry & Jazz with Nikki Iles and the John Williams Octet. In All My Holy Mountain, their celebration of the life and work of Mary Webb, is available on CD from www.jazzcds.co.uk. His memoir, The Horseman's Word, (Jonathan Cape, 2011) was shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerley Prize. His previous collections from Carcanet include Given Ground (1989), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.