Last Poem for Sarah by John Powell Ward

Last Poem for Sarah by John Powell Ward

In Last Poem for Sarah and Other Poems, John Powell Ward, now in the seventh decade of his career, offers memorable work on childhood and recollections of Wales. Most poignant though is his commentary on grief in the titular elegy for his late wife, Sarah. Last Poem for Sarah contains a sequence of fourteen sonnets of ‘childhood and after’, where intense memories of joy and pain are captured precisely. There are striking stories here, like that of a mother desperately trying to appease and breastfeed her baby on the train. There is the tale of a grammar school teacher who regularly erupted into violence and hit the boys with the lids of their desks, and a vivid portrait of brothers visiting a log cabin in Ontario where the ice is ten feet thick. A sequence of poems about experiences of Wales is rich and well-observed capturing a strong sense of time and place, for example in ‘Toby Jugs in the White Lion at Ferryside Station, Dyfed’. Recollections range around important figures from the Welsh arts like a memorable encounter with R.S.Thomas who is drawn into conversation by the sighting of a chough, or the parable about the house of Welsh architect and painter, Ernest Morgan, a recluse in his lifetime but whose house now brims with tourists.

John Powell Ward, a poet with strong connections to Wales, was born in Suffolk and educated at the Universities of Toronto, Cambridge and Wales. Editor of Poetry Wales from 1975 to 1980, he is the author of critical works on Wordsworth and R.S. Thomas among others, and editor of the Border Lines series. His career spans seven decades.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781781727195
ISBN 10	1781727198
Title	Last Poem for Sarah
Author	John Powell Ward
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Poetry Wales Press
Year published	2023-07-31
Number of pages	38
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.