Publisher's Synopsis
The poetry of Edward Lucie-Smith begins in A Tropical Childhood (1961), a rich landscape overlaid with different kinds of emotional and spiritual hunger. The poet became central to the Group, leading its sessions and experimenting with forms, in particular the dramatic monologues contain in Confessions and Histories (1964). With Towards Silence (1968) his poetry sought a new direction. Weary of 'conventional verse forms' and their inflexibility, and tired of the sobriquet 'poet' which had become devalued, he began experiments with poster poems, concrete verse, poetry solely for recitation. His last major collection, The Well Wishers, appeared in 1974. Since then his poems have only appeared in limited editions.
Changing Shape is not so much a return from disaffection as a careful sorting out of the valid from the invalid work in his oeuvre, and it contains a number of terse, penetrating poems of human and social comment composed in recent years. He remains a poet of the erotic and the aesthetic - it is often hard to separate the terms in his work - and there is an historical and sometimes a religious sensibility at work.
