Poetry
Between 1936-85 Lowbury published seven commercial collections (and shared in two joint collections). Much of that work can be found in the following (which were followed by a new collection):
- Selected and New Poems 1935-1989 (Frome, 1990)
- Collected Poems (University of Salzburg, Austria, 1993)
- Mystic Bridge (Frome, 1997)
A considerable part of Lowbury’s poetic output appeared first in small press editions, from which he then drew for his more commercial collections. Pride of place goes to the nine publications from Roy Lewis' Keepsake Press, some quite substantial, such as Poetry & Paradox (1976) with its 19 poems and introductory essay, or Birmingham! Birmingham! (1985) with its 22. Comparable with these are Goldrush from Roger Pringle’s Celandine Press (Shipston-on-Stour, 1983), which has 19 titles of which one is a six-part sequence, and Variations from Aldeburgh from Peter Scupham’s Mandeville Press (Hitchin, 1987), which has 13 poems. Several of these books were made even larger by the number of illustrations that accompanied the poems: in the latter work there are eight line drawings by Donald Fairhall, while the three poems in Flowering Cypress from Kenneth Lindley’s Pointing Finger Press (Hereford, 1986) are supplemented by four of the artist’s woodcuts and a linoprint. Birmingham printers who used Lowbury’s work include F.E.Pardoe (The Ring, 1979) and David Wishart, whose Hayloft Press published a number of folded cards between 1987-97.
As a poet, Lowbury has been described as ‘a sort of missing link between the Georgians and The Movement’. His work, while remaining formal, avoided the mawkishness of the former and the attitudinising of the latter. Standing apart from literary fashions, he has a place among those of any age who continue to be read for having given lyrical expression to a striking or moving thought in plain and concise language. In this he resembled his father-in-law, Andrew Young, and Lowbury often explained that it was because he recognised Young’s mastery of what he himself wished to achieve in poetry that he first made contact with the older poet.
The originality of the best of his poetry is on a par with that of his scientific work; it was achieved by rejecting the conventional and appealing to reason. But his scepticism was leavened with humour and appreciation of paradox, in which he found the stuff of poetry. One aspect of this, as the critic Glyn Pursglove has pointed out, was his play on words and subtle use of allusion. He also had (in life as in art) a narrative gift which particularly relished the off-beat and macabre. On the other hand, having a weakness for writing occasional verse on request, or prolonging a single theme into a sequence, in the poetry of his retirement he allowed the publication of work that is forced and pedestrian.
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Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)