Selected Poems

Influenced by Yeats, Thomas Blackburn's work in the Fifties and Sixties dramatized the conflict between faith and sexuality, drawing on myth, Christian imagery and Jungian tropes, he produced a spare and challenging body of work.

Thomas Blackburn was haunted. His child-hood was dominated by an obsessive father (an Anglican priest of Mauritian descent) who scoured his face with peroxide to lighten his skin, and an over-affectionate mother. Moral and sexual uncertainties form the core of his poetry and prose. In a creative life interrupted by bouts of alcoholism and ill health, he wrote into the 1970s, developing an intimate and confessional voice of great power. He began to publish in the late 1940s, combining writing with two other passions: mountain climbing and spiritualism. Notable collections include The Outer Darkness (1951), The Holy Stone (1954), The Next Word (1958), and A Smell of Burning (1961). The poet was regarded as having 'gone off', overwhelmed by Jung and Yeats. A Selected Poems appeared in 1975, and the posthumous Bread for the Winter Birds in 1980. His autobiography, A Clip of Steel (1969), is an unsparing self-portrait.