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ISBN: 979-8291950456
Richard Craven writes as if the last two centuries were a ghastly misunderstanding -and he’s here to put things right.
Collected Shorter Verse Vol. 1 gathers the first tranche of Craven’s poetic work, drawing from the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian and the Odes, Epigrams & Further Sonnets. What emerges is a dual corpus of iambic attack, civic lament, and philosophical invective. The sonnets are formally impeccable and morally exasperated; the epigrams cut with Augustan precision; the couplets march in step with Pope, Dryden, and Swift- only to find themselves parked outside a Travelodge on the M4.
A literary traditionalist with a taste for provocation, Craven does not deploy meter as ornament but as armature: rhyme as rigour, form as fidelity. His verse defends the architecture of classical poetics while gleefully soiling its soft furnishings. It is erudite, scurrilous, and composed with a craftsman’s pride in each line’s turning.
A rare achievement: learned, lacerating, and metrical to the bone.