West Pathway by Steve Ellis
When Steve Ellis was a youthful Gregory award-winning poet, the Literary Review hailed him as 'a wonderfully no-nonsense writer...a sardonic Yorkshireman monitoring scenes rooted in directly accessible experience'. He went on to publish his first book with Bloodaxe in 1987, Home and Away, which got some good reviews. Seven years have passed, and Ellis has assembled a second collection. Life may have frayed him a bit in the meantime, but his deadpan humour is as wicked as ever, and he's still able to chronicle the rituals of family and the sad or absurd nuances of ordinary lives with warmth, affection, and just a little grumpiness. He's acquired a wife and family, a mortgage and a cat, and bears his responsibilities with a shrug and the odd, wary poem. He's moved to Birmingham, where he teaches at the University, and he's become something of an authority on Dante and Eliot. And he's written this book of wry, often hilarious poems: about lawnmowers, growing up in York, shoes, fish and chips, the death of Joe Loss, Christmas cards, and other matters of great and small importance.
Steve Ellis is very much a Bloodaxe poet: toughly comic, anti-metropolitan, often verbally exuberant in his reports on one provincial's experience of contemporary mores-- John Lucas
Fishing and rugby journalists, Doncaster trippers at St Tropez - all receive a skilful, artful lampooning. One is reminded, reading these poems, of Douglas Dunn with a vicious streak...a more than worthy debut. -- Martin Booth * Tribune *
Fishing and rugby journalists, Doncaster trippers at St Tropez - all receive a skilful, artful lampooning. One is reminded, reading these poems, of Douglas Dunn with a vicious streak...a more than worthy debut. -- Martin Booth * Tribune *
Born in York in 1952, Steve Ellis has published three collections of poetry, including Home and Away (1987) and West Pathway (1993) from Bloodaxe, verse translations of Dante's Inferno and The Divine Comedy and a number of academic monographs on writers such as Chaucer, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. He studied English and Art History at University College London, later completing a PhD there on the influence of Dante on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English poetry. He has been Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham since 1998.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781852242350 |
| ISBN 10 | 1852242353 |
| Title | West Pathway |
| Author | Steve Ellis |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 1993-06-17 |
| Number of pages | 64 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |