Bernard Spencer

When Bernard Spencer died in September 1963, he left behind two collections of poetry and a volume of collaborative translations from George Seferis. The second of these collections, With Luck Lasting, has proved aptly entitled with the publications of a Collected Poems (1965) edited by Alan Ross, an enlarged edition from 1981 edited by Roger Bowen, and a Complete Poetry, Translations & Selected Prose (2011) edited by Peter Robinson. With Bernard Spencer: Essays on his Poetry & Life, Robinson now offers the first collection of writings dedicated to the poet. Coming out of a 2009 centenary conference at Special Collections in the University of Reading, where his archive is housed, these essays cover a great many aspects of Spencer's poetry, translations, and his relations with contemporary writers. The volume also contains an updated bibliography of primary and secondary materials, and forms an invaluable aid to approaching this distinctive voice in mid-twentieth-century poetry.