Collected Poems

T. S. Eliot took George Barker onto the Faber poetry list in 1935 with Poems, when Barker was only twenty-two. This was the beginning of a publishing association which would endure through nineteen further volumes. There was an earlier Collected Poems published in 1957, but this edition, published in 1987 towards the end of the writers life, is the definitive edition. Here, readers have access to the contents of all of those volumes together with lesser-known work published by smaller presses and journals both in the UK and abroad. The book allows us to follow the evolution of a major talent who subscribed to no school and scorned all affiliation, but whose work is uncompromisingly true in both its stylistic integrity and its unswerving conception of poetic responsibility.

His work was passionate, intellectually challenging and highly original, his language

incantatory and often hypnotic. Peter Wilby, Guardian