Swimming Chenango Lake

Charles Tomlinson was born in Stoke on Trent in 1927. He studied at Cambridge with Donald Davie and taught at the University of Bristol from 1956 until his retirement. He published many collections of poetry as well as volumes of criticism and translation, and edited the Oxford Book of Verse in Translation (1980). His poetry won international recognition and received many prizes in Europe and the United States, including the 1993 Bennett Award from the Hudson Review; the New Criterion Poetry Prize, 2002; the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Ennio Flaiano, 2001; and the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Attilio Bertolucci, 2004. He was an Honorary Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, and of the Modern Language Association. Charles Tomlinson was made a CBE in 2001 for his contribution to literature. He died in 2015; The poet David Morley, editor of this volume, is an ecologist and naturalist by background. He won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems and a Cholmondeley Award for his contribution to poetry. His Carcanet collections include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, Enchantment, The Invisible Kings and Scientific Papers. He wrote The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing and is co-editor with the Australian poet Philip Neilsen of The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing. David Morley studied with Charles Tomlinson at Bristol and currently teaches at the University of Warwick. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

`Tomlinson is one of the most astute, disciplined, and lucent poets of his generation. His quiet, meditative voice will reverberate on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time to come.’ - Edward Hirsch