Movement of Mind, A

These essays are largely biographical excursions into literary history. They collect Tony Roberts’s work for literary magazines from the past five years. His focus is on celebrating the controversial, unfashionable or underrated.
At the same time the book traces a movement of its author’s interests from mid-C20th American poets and critics to mid-C19th English biographers, illustrated in particular by the work of two prominent writers and networkers of their times: Robert Lowell and Matthew Arnold.

Praise for Roberts’s poetry:

‘an authentic adult voice, tender, ironic, relaxed and highly educated’ – Al Alvarez

and for the prose:

‘always cogent, spirited, genial, informed [and] entertaining’ – Dave Smith

Tony Roberts is a poet, critic and retired teacher, educated in England and America. He is a regular contributor to leading literary magazines such as PN Review, The London Magazine, Stand and Agenda. Roberts’s  fifth poetry collection, The Noir American & Other Poems, was published in 2018. He is the editor of Poetry in the Blood (2014) and the author of two other collections of essays on poets and critics. The more recent, The Taste of My Mornings, was published in 2019. All are from Shoestring Press.