Ken Smith 
Collected Poems 

Ken Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry, his work and example inspiring a whole generation of younger British poets. His politically edgy, cuttingly colloquial, muscular poetry poetry shifted territory with time, from rural Yorkshire, America and London to the war-ravaged Balkans and Eastern Europe (before and after Communism). His early books span a transition from a preoccupation with land and myth to his later engagement with urban Britain and the politics of radical disaffection. The pivotal work marking this shift was his long poem Fox Running (1980), brought to recent attention when an archive recording of him reading it was broadcast by BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please in 2016. His Collected Poems brings together poetry from four decades, including all the work from two earlier retrospectives, The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 (1982) and Shed: Poems 1980-2001 (2002), and from from the posthumously published You Again: last poems & other words (2004), as well as additional poems from two early collections, The Pity (1967) and Work, distances / poems (1972). The book is introduced with essays by Roger Garfitt and Jon Glover. Publication coincides with his 80th birthday and with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Bloodaxe’s first title, Ken Smith’s Tristan Crazy (1978).

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Ken Smith (1938-2003) was born in Rudston, East Yorkshire, the son of an itinerant farm labourer. He lived in Leeds, Exeter, London and the US, and was writer-in-residence at Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1985-87, which prompted a poetry collection, Wormwood (1987), and Inside Time (1989), his book about imprisonment, Wormwood Scrubs and the men he met there. He was working in Berlin when the Wall came down, writing a book about East and West Berlin: this turned into Berlin: Coming in from the Cold (1990).