"This collection is an essential delight; a `book resonant of a life / neither following nor in pursuit', gathering old and new work all equally fresh. As the epigraph to the first poem attests, `one does not work out of a reaction against but rather out of affection for something.' Like Mayakovsky, John James has produced a body of work perfectly able to marry lyricism and coarseness, rage and tenderness - and, like the Futurist, to weld the aesthetic to the social. Here is that rarest poet: able to adequately respond to pleasure, and equally able to create it. The selection spans 50 years of work in all its subtlety of tone and address - a hybrid of a Welsh `praise' tradition, playfully mannered English reserve, and New York School exuberance. This is a poetry deftly attuned to various musics, overtly engaged with the visual arts, yet just as happy out in the streets at home and abroad - and more than partial to a walk in the countryside. The poems of the last decade are singular in their `reach toward the poetry of kindred / where we speak in our work as we seldom do otherwise.' Embrace this New and Selected James: here is an effervescent poetry that can leave nobody indifferent." -Simon Perril "James is decidedly un-English in his love of French and German poetry, in his unembarrassed (and unembarrassing) celebration of the pleasures of the flesh, and in his Marxist and republican politics - which seem to legitimate a taste for the finer things on the grounds of international solidarity against a British suppression of the capacity for joy ... John James is one of the great sensualists of twentieth-century lyric poetry." -John Wilkinson

Table of Contents:
New & Uncollected Poems Affection Romsey, Take 1 Romsey, Take 2 Romsey, Take 3 Sketches from a Bristol Palette Flickering Encounter The River Un reve du soir Rouen The Appearances From the Welsh Sunday Afternoon on the Esplanade Vocalise The Green Ray Waza-Ari! The Night Alphaville '58 Cork City Manifest A Sonnet Solid Elements Sanctus On Reading J.H. Prynne's Sub Songs Nightmare Selected Poems Poem Beginning with a Line of Andrew Crozier A Visitation Breakfast at Red Lodge Reading Barry & Guillaume in Puisserguier August October Recollection Ode: Les Sarments En Sevrage Meet Your Friends at the Still & Sugarloaf At Chateau Chinon Baudelaire at Cebazan Nocturne with Baudelaire A Touch Pimlico Last Days of the Vulcan 6:00 p.m. The Postcard Sonata Letters from Sarah `for the snow' `the day writhes in an immense crater' 27 October 1969 Good Old Harry May Day Greetings 1971 A Theory of Poetry Inaugural Address Craven Images Karol in Tunisia After Francis Amunategui Bye Bye Blackbird Shakin All Over Poem for Bruce McLean Local After Eugene Boudin Lines for Richard Long Colonial Medley