Publisher's Synopsis
S�an Rafferty's poetry has been one of the best-kept secrets of the last
four decades. W.S. Graham was rediscovered and celebrated in his last
years; Nicholas Moore never quite faded from sight. Rafferty, unambitious
for fame, concentrating on his life and his art, began to come to light in
1973, with a small Grosseteste selection. A decade later his poems were
featured in PN Review, submitted not by the poet but by Ted Hughes who
admired the work. A decade after that two pamphlets appeared. Shortly
before his death he agreed that Carcanet could publish his Collected, and
Sorley MacLean provided a fitting epigraph: 'I remember Sean Rafferty in
1929-30, when he was amazing us at Edinburgh University with his brilliance
in the Hugh Selwyn Mauberley manner of Pound, and with some very different
poems that were perhaps adumbrations of his mature poetry, than which
nothing could be more different from the early Pound. This mature poetry is
to me very individual and very original. It is the authentic expression of
a gentle, lovable nature, with an implicit sadness that can be called quiet
and even mellow, and as Nicholas Johnson has said, mysterious. I feel that
the mysteriousness is part of the expression of a profundity.'
