Collected Poems

This posthumously published retrospection covers Downie's collections A Strange Here (1977) and Plainsong (1981) along with a larger number of previously uncollected poems. ‘Geoffrey Grigson, who gave his approval to very few new poets, greeted A Stranger Here, Freda Downie’s first collection, as “a better book of new poems than any I have read for years… She writes as if she had been – intermittently – working away for ages, getting it better and better”. ‘Although Freda Downie was to publish only one more full book before her death in 1993, the equally well received Plainsong, she continued, as Grigson said, to get it better and better. Because she was shy of publishing she received less of the limelight than she might have had, but nevertheless, her work in anthologies has always drawn admiring critical attention. Her readers would certainly agree that she wrote no bad poems. Furthermore, they would propose, few contemporary poets have written with such sad luminosity. ‘Indeed, her poetry is one of sharp distillations: single figures in social landscapes moving between yearning and disappointment, between fear and the desire of oblivion, listening and watching everything intently with a witty, even humorous attention. These figures know their manners but are conscious of their eccentricity and of the mire and fury of human veins implicit in manners; they also know that the clearer, sharper and suddener the danger of oblivion, the sharper, clearer and intenser the poem that sense of danger animates. ‘With something of Stevie Smith’s melancholy, an element of Jane Austen’s precision and the clarity of Grigson himself at his best, Freda Downie remains all the time inimitably herself. More than that, this volume of her collected poems will show her to have been one of the most poignant and memorable poets of our time.' – George Szirtes.

Freda Downie (1929-93) was born in London, and spent her early years living in a temporary wooden house on the outskirts at Shooters Hill, from where she roamed the lanes and woods of the nearby Kent countryside. She was educated in Britain and Australia, and latterly lived in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. She worked for music publishers and art agents for many years, and only began publishing her poems in the 1970s, in limited editions. Two full collections, A Stranger Here (1977) and Plainsong (1981) followed from Secker & Warburg. She completed a further collection, Forty Poems, which was not published. Her Collected Poems, edited by George Szirtes, was published posthumously by Bloodaxe Books in 1995. In 2003 Bloodaxe published her memoir, There'll Always Be an England: a poet's childhood, 1929-1945, written in the last year of her life, covers the most vivid and formative times in her early life, which included evacuation to Northamptonshire in September 1939, a return to London in time for the Battle of Britain and the Blitz; then the family’s hazardous sea voyage from November 1941 to February 1942 around the Cape to her father’s war work in Australia, and the return in 1944 across the Pacific and though the Panama Canal to a London under threat from the V1 and V2 bombs.