Overview

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.

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9781781727195

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Reviews

'John Powell Ward combines an uncompromising integrity with a contemporary flair for understatement... one is left with the impression of having been told the truth cleanly and with warmth.'; - Times Literary Supplement;'...linguistic dexterity and poetic skill' -Books Council of Wales.

Author Information

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.

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