Roberts revived
A major event in the poetry world: the Carcanet edition of Lynette Roberts is finally out. During her lifetime, following her joining the Jehevah’s Witnesses and difficulties with mental illness, Roberts didn’t permit the reprinting of her work. A posthumous attempt at an edition from Seren Books was scuttled when the Roberts estate objected to some factual errors in the preface and took legal action; the entire run was pulped, barring the odd copy that escaped. So this is the first time that general readers can get their hands on Gods with Stainless Ears, which ought to be among any list of major 20th-century long poems. (I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve xeroxed my file copy of the original Faber edition for poets and academics of my acquaintance — it’s already a samizdat classic among knowledgeable fans of 20th-century poetry.) Congratulations to Patrick McGuinness for editing this long-overdue edition of Roberts’ work. The first review I’ve seen is available here. I haven’t yet got hold of the edition; from a brief email exchange with the editor I gather it’s just the bare texts, no notes or prefatory matter (perhaps a result of the Seren debacle). Readers who need a little guidance can try the notes I put together with the assistance of Nigel Wheale, John Pikoulis, Ian Patterson & others for Keith Tuma’s OUP anthology for the Roberts selection (the last two sections of GWSE), though there’s the odd thing in there I would now change. But it’s probably best to first encounter her work without guidance, in all its entrancing strangeness.
Now that Roberts is removed from the list of most-needing-a-decent-edition, her place is taken by Rosemary Tonks. I gather Michael Schmidt at Carcanet has been trying for years to get permission to do a collected Tonks, another author who unfortunately ended up repudiating her writing. Fingers crossed… Tonks was, last time I checked, still alive, so the situation may be rather different.
June 16th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
Rosemary Tonks is still alive? What group did she end up joining? I am exceedingly new to her work and I am interested in finding out more about her. I am combing through the stacks at Duke. Any direction you could point me in would be appreciated.
June 16th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
She was still alive circa 2000 when Keith Tuma & I were securing permissions for the selections in the Anthology of 20th-Century British and Irish Poetry. We didn’t correspond directly but were given to understand by the literary agent that she was indeed still kicking. I haven’t seen an obit since then, so think she’s still around.
There is a decent article on her in one volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (it’s not recent, but since Tonks has not published anything since then it’s not out of date either) — I think it was a volume on contemporary UK novelists. There is also an appreciation of her poetry in Poetry Review from about 3-4 years ago.
I don’t know the details about her later biography — the references I have simply refer to her joining “an evangelical Christian sect”.