Ted Walker
This long-awaited definitive edition brings together, for the first time, all the poetry Ted Walker published during his lifetime, with the exception of his poetry for children. He published seven single volumes, from Fox on a Barn Door (1965) to Mangoes on the Moon (1999). Many of his poems were first published in The New Yorker.Critical introductions to each collection and notes that illuminate the history and development of the poems make this the essential volume for admirers of Walker’s poetic work.Walker’s poetry won praise for its nature imagery; through the lives of animals, it explores aspects of the human condition such as fatherhood, loneliness and human labour in poems including ’By the Saltings’, ’Moth’ and ’Ox’.His fascination with the coast - the shingle and sand of Lancing beach and the Adur estuary at Shoreham - is best explained by Walker’s childhood: he grew up at a time when they were all strictly off-limits, mined and guarded against a possible invasion. In his autobiographical The High Path he writes, 'This, then, was what Peace was: to stand and gaze at the unsinister sea; to pick up a streamer of bladder-wrack and watch it lift with the wind.'His poetry also explores grief and loss, while the later volumes broaden their geographical horizons beyond Sussex to the Welsh countryside, Spain and Australia. 6
