Collected Poems

David Chaloner’s landmark Collected Poems offers us a spectacular journey into a restless, generous and incisive mind. Pondering on technology, politics, fashion and the emotions, and using typographic and formal experiment, Chaloner tackles the densities of meaning.

This landmark Collected Poems from one of Britain’s major post-war poets, gathers together work from over four decades, and includes previously unpublished material that has remained outside the scope of Chaloner’s major collections.In drawing the book together, Chaloner has updated and revised poems into a thematic whole, a decision supported by the remarkable consistency of vision, inquiry and purpose in his work. What we have is a magnum opus, a chronological sweep through Britain’s dynamic and troubled reinvention from the Sixties to the present day extending his range from the intimate and local to the social and global. Chaloner’s personal battleground is the truth, but his writing is a triumph of poise and tone. His is primarily a poetry of sensibility, and we are accompanied rather than addressed, encouraged rather than admonished.From the early ruralist poems of wry, intimate observation to the recent critical visions of the Twenty-first Century world, Chaloner’s focus remains undaunted, locating us in the here and now, with our eyes faced forward on to the future, a future we are all responsible for and into which we must all travel.