New and Selected Poems

These are not common-or-garden poems. They don't behave like poems at all. They sing, they dance, they make the reader wince, they get under the skin. Reading New And Selected Poems is like going to a smoke-filled jazz club, or the back streets of a beautiful crazy Italian city. By the time you get home you'll never be the same.

---

New And Selected Poems brings together a quarter of a century of exceptional writing.


Julian Stannard started his career as a writer in the Italian port city of Genoa. He has written at length about Liguria and Italy in general. His work has been translated into Italian and he finds his place in a rich Anglo-Ligurian tradition. This gathering of poems from many collections infuses his love of Italy with a clear-eyed view of modern Britain.


These are poems which can wrong foot and startle and bewilder. If his roots are English and Irish, his instincts are mainland European. His satirical appetite draws from Swift and Gogol and Lear. Stannard ultimately creates an unmistakable voice – the commonplace is again and again made strange and yet stranger still.