The Falls
£20.00
This is Clive Wilmer’s first book since his Selected Poems (1995). None of the poems have appeared together before and they amount to a remarkable grouping of elegies, homages, ‘devotions’ and epiphanies that, as ever in his work, ponder the inter-animations of body and spirit, man and nature, permanence and flow. The keynote is awe, a sense of wonder at the mystery of things, a sense of duty to natural and artistic truths and forms or, as it goes in the title poem, the ‘order in which things fall, / or what intelligence will make of them.’
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This is Clive Wilmer’s first book since his Selected Poems (1995). None of the poems have appeared together before and they amount to a remarkable grouping of elegies, homages, ‘devotions’ and epiphanies that, as ever in his work, ponder the inter-animations of body and spirit, man and nature, permanence and flow. The keynote is awe, a sense of wonder at the mystery of things, a sense of duty to natural and artistic truths and forms or, as it goes in the title poem, the ‘order in which things fall, / or what intelligence will make of them.’
Published: 1 May 2000
ISBN: 0-9530947-31
Pages: ???
“Clive Wilmer’s poetry has always meant a lot to me – for its unfaltering clarity, for its delicacy of execution and weightiness of statement and for its faithfulness to its subject matter, without attitudinising or lies.”
Thom Gunn
“boldly lyrical, broad in reference, felicitous in the craft of verse.”
Elizabeth Jennings
“a poet with a distinctly religious consciousness… the poems are chiselled with unusual skill.”
Vernon Scannell
Clive Wilmer (1945-2025) was a poet and scholar best known for his advocacy of the work of the Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin and of the poet Thom Gunn. He taught for 25 years at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where in 2012 he was made an emeritus fellow in English literature.
Wilmer began publishing poetry in the early 1970s, his first book appearing in 1977. Worple Press published four collections: The Falls (2000), Stigmata (2005), Urban Pastorals (2014) and Passio (2011), his translations of poems by János Pilinszky. His New and Collected Poems (2012) are published by Carcanet. Wilmer’s final book, Architecture & Other Poems, will be published by Worple Press in 2025.
An occasional broadcaster, Wilmer fronted BBC Radio 3’s ‘Poet of the Month’ programmes in the early 1990s and his interviews are published as Poets Talking (Carcanet, 1994).
An obituary by Peter Carpenter is published in the Guardian (8 April 2025).
