Publisher's Synopsis
In 1922 Ivor Gurney entered the Dartford asylum where he was to stay for the rest of his life. Only an occasional poem in a magazine was published and he died almost forgotten in 1937. Like Isaac Rosenberg and like his beloved Edward Thomas, he was a substantial war poet whose value was discovered late; like Thomas and Charlotte Mew, he would have been a lumen et decor in the Georgian canon. It was not until the 1982 Collected Poems, edited by P.J.Kavanagh, that his stature -- and the disgrace of his neglect -- became apparent.
He did not stop writing. P.J.Kavanagh produced the Collected and Selected Poems in 1982 and 1990. Gurney went from small books to Collected in a single leap. It is worth reconstructing a more conventional process, reinventing books Gurney wished to see published in his lifetime. He put such volumes together, as John Clare did a century earlier, without hope of publication. 80 Poems or So is perhaps the most complete and is published to mark the sixtieth anniversary of his death.
