The Rain and the Glass (Paperback)

When Robert Nye's first poems were published, G.S. Fraser declared in the Times Literary Supplement: "Here is a proper poet, though it is hard to see how the larger literary public (greedy for flattery of their own concerns) could be brought to recognise that. But other proper poets - how many of them are left? - will recognize one of themselves." Since then Nye has become known to a large public for his novels, especially Falstaff (1976) winner of the Hawthornden Prize and The Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Late Mr Shakespeare (1998). But his true vocation has always been poetry, and it is as a poet that he is best known to his fellow poets. "Nye is the inheritor of a poetic tradition that runs from Donne and Ralegh to Edward Thomas and Robert Graves," wrote James Aitchison in 1990, while the critic Gabriel Josipovici has described him as "one of the most interesting poets writing today, with a voice unlike that of any of his contemporaries." This book contains all the poems Nye has written since his Collected Poems of 1995, together with his own selection from that volume.