W. S. Graham - The Nightfishing and After

The Nightfishing and After

In 1954, Graham returned to Cornwall to live near the St. Ives artists colony. Here he became friendly with several of the resident painters, including Bryan Wynter and Roger Hilton. The following year, Faber and Faber published his The Nightfishing, a book whose title poem is marked a dramatic change in Graham's poetry. The poem moved on from his earlier style and a move away from the neo-romantic/apocalyptic tag. Unfortunately for the poet, the poem's appearance coincided with the rise of the Movement with their open hostility to the neo-romantics, and, despite the support of Eliot and Hugh MacDiarmid, the book was neither a critical nor a popular success.

It was to be fifteen years before Graham published another book, Malcolm Mooney's Land (1970). This, and his last book, "Implements In Their Places" are a truly original and enduring poetic achievements, for which Graham is only slowly coming to be recognised. For many years, he had been living in semi-poverty on his income as a writer, but in 1974 he received a Civil List pension of £500 per year. Perhaps because of this alleviation of his financial circumstances, Graham began to publish with more frequency, with Implements in their Places (1977), Collected Poems 1942–1977 (1979) and an American-published Selected Poems (1980). He died in Madron, Cornwall in 1986. His last collection Aimed at Nobody was published posthumously in 1993 and a book of Uncollected Poems appeared in 1990. Faber brought out a new Selected Poems in 1996. The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters was published in 1999 and New Collected Poems in 2005.

As this posthumous publication activity indicates, Graham's reputation has grown in recent years. Some might argue this is partly due to Harold Pinter's often-expressed enthusiasm for the poet, or attribute his increasing recognition to the widespread advocacy of poets associated with the British Poetry Revival. However Graham's work was represented in the anthology Conductors of Chaos (1996) by a selection introduced by the poet and critic Tony Lopez, who also wrote a book-length study, The Poetry of W. S. Graham (1989).