Collected Poems: 1944-1979 [Paperback]

Kingsley Amis’s poetry tackles all the grimly humorous subjects he tackled in his novels—lust, lost love, booze, money and the lack of it, old age, death—and does so with immense formal poise. A master of both traditional and unconventional meters with a perfect ear for parody, Amis wrote satires, epigrams, and rueful and scornful songs that are remarkable not only for their virtuosity and humor but for their scabrous realism. It all adds up to a small, entirely individual, and memorably bracing body of work. As Amis writes: “Beauty, they tell me, is a dangerous thing, / Whose touch will burn, but I’m asbestos, see?”“Amis wrote the sort of poems that have long fallen out of fashion: bare-knuckled, witty, light but never ‘lite,’ outward-looking instead of inward-gazing–a kind of red-blooded vers de société that is in a league with E. A. Robinson’s poignant cameos and ‘Eros Turannos’; with Auden’s ‘Miss Gee,’ ‘On the Circuit,’ and ‘Who’s  Who’; and with the poems of his friends and fellow Movement poets Robert Conquest and Philip Larkin.” – David Yezzi,The New Criterion

“Simply one of our best poets.”—The Daily TelegraphKingsley Amis(1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, satirist, and critic. Born in suburban South London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the mustard-maker Colman’s, he won an English scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following service in the British Army’s Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales.Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Ultimately he pul3;