Prefatory Note

Summary

Only two collections of Ivor Gurney's poems were published during his lifetime. Severn & Somme was first published in 1917 and reprinted two years later. War 's Embers was also published in 1919, but to disappointing reviews and poor sales. Gurney tried to interest his publishers, Sidgwick & Jackson, in further collections, notably one that became known as 80 Poems or So, which he offered them twice in 1922. However, like all his other would-be collections, 80 Poems or So remained unpublished until the 1990s. During that decade R. K. R. Thornton and George Walter brought out important editions of the two published collections, as well as 80 Poems or So, Best Poems and the Book of Five Makings, and finally Rewards of Wonder. In between, there had been two selections of Gurney's poems by Edmund Blunden (1954) and Leonard Clarke (1973), and then, in 1982, and beginning the upturn of Gurney's posthumous reputation, P. J. Kavanagh's Collected Poems. Although Thornton and Walter have had cause to revise the dating and text of some of the poems Kavanagh includes, as well as putting into print poems he excluded or was unaware of (for Collected certainly doesn't mean Complete), anyone who cares about Gurney owes Kavanagh a huge debt, not least for his magnificent Introduction. I can recall very clearly Derek Mahon phoning me to ask whether I'd like to review the edition for the New Statesman, of which I was then poetry reviewer as Derek was poetry editor. I wasn't all that keen, I told him. I'd read Blunden's selection and I couldn't imagine there'd be much in the Kavanagh that would cause me to revise my opinion of Gurney as a minor Georgian. ‘Still,’ I said, ‘send it along and I'll see if there's anything worth saying about him.’

Two days later Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney arrived. I sat in the garden, turning over pages, looking at verses that were, yes, more or less as I remembered. And then, quite suddenly, I was staring at a poem which did what all true, original poems do, left me gasping, knowing beyond doubt that I was in the presence of genius. The review I subsequently wrote for the New Statesman, inadequate though I'm sure it was, tried to alert readers to the fact that with the arrival of Kavanagh's edition the landscape of twentieth-century poetry had been permanently changed.