Set Thy Love in Order
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Product details
- ISBN 9781784103767
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 29 Jun 2017
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems gathers the work of some thirty years, taken from Stephen Romer’s four previous collections, along with a substantial selection of new poems.
The title is a Dantesque imperative as old as the Trecento: Ordina questo amore, O tu che m’ ami – set thy love in order, o thou who lovest me. Romer’s central theme is encapsulated by these words, and his prolonged and painstaking exploration of the ‘intermittences of the heart’, frequently carried out with a Francophile self-consciousness and rueful wit, constitute so many variations on the theme.
Romer’s New & Selected articulates the constant oscillation between love, loss and longing, and the religious desire for ‘refuge’ or ‘higher things’, and how powerfully these can come to rhythm the life of the mind and the emotions. His more recent work has included poems of love and mourning for his parents, and elegies for friends.
Derek Mahon singled out Romer’s first collection Idols for its ‘emotional candour and intellectual clarity’, and since then the poet has endeavoured to turn the light of the intellect (and the wit) on the frequently chaotic and contradictory material of the heart.
The title is a Dantesque imperative as old as the Trecento: Ordina questo amore, O tu che m’ ami – set thy love in order, o thou who lovest me. Romer’s central theme is encapsulated by these words, and his prolonged and painstaking exploration of the ‘intermittences of the heart’, frequently carried out with a Francophile self-consciousness and rueful wit, constitute so many variations on the theme.
Romer’s New & Selected articulates the constant oscillation between love, loss and longing, and the religious desire for ‘refuge’ or ‘higher things’, and how powerfully these can come to rhythm the life of the mind and the emotions. His more recent work has included poems of love and mourning for his parents, and elegies for friends.
Derek Mahon singled out Romer’s first collection Idols for its ‘emotional candour and intellectual clarity’, and since then the poet has endeavoured to turn the light of the intellect (and the wit) on the frequently chaotic and contradictory material of the heart.
Stephen Romer was born in Hertfordshire in 1957 and read English at Cambridge. For many years he has lived in France, where he was Maître de Conférences at Tours University from 1990-2024. He has taught in the US and has held Visiting Fellowships at Cambridge and Oxford, where he has twice served as RLF Fellow. He is currently Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford. He has published four full collections and Set Thy Love in Order, a new and selected came out in 2017. He has published several anthologies and volumes of translation, notably of Yves Bonnefoy, whose Poems and Prose (2017/2020) he co-edited for Carcanet. With Patrick McGuinness he won the 2024 Scott-Moncrieff Prize for The Day’s Ration by Gilles Ortlieb (Arc, 2023). A volume of criticism, Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism (Legenda, MHRA/Cambridge) came out in 2024. He has recorded his poetry for the Poetry Archive. He was made FRSL in 2011, and Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres in 2021.
