The Endless Bookcase
Sharing Experiences and Expertise
Lately — Stephen Yeo
Classification: Poetry, Modern and contemporary poetry (c 1900 onwards)
×
Rating 0 (from 0 votes)
Rating: 5.00 out of 5 (1 customer ratings)
Reviews
Bernard O’Donoghue
marvellous
I have been enjoying and admiring Stephen Yeo's Lately hugely. The outcome of this project is marvellous. It is always moving to see poems you have admired finding their place in the full context of a book, and to find a fitness in the setting: poems like 'Sister. Future Perfect' and the poems following it in the section of 'Tributes and Aches' (which is a wonderful section as a whole) - Stephen Yeo makes great use of Shakespeare, but is very good with intertextuality altogether. 'An lllicit Ache' is one of those poems which capture a profound sentiment unforgettably: my favourite line is Flesh of my flesh, it's nothing personal.
I don't know of anyone else who could have written that; if I came across it in an anthology (which in due course perhaps we all may) I would have ascribed it to Stephen. It's the interweaving of Biblical language with the everyday. To quote Chaucer: 'ther is namore to say'.
Bernard O’Donoghue
Poet and Emeritus Fellow, Wadham College, Oxford
Verified Purchase
Stephen Stuart-Smith
Outstanding first collection
It's wonderful to reacquaint myself with Stephen Yeo's poems and I congratulate him on Lately, an absolutely outstanding first collection. What a glowing example of late maturity! There are a few examples on my list of poets who bided their time, or took to the art form in later life, and I'm not sure which category Stephen comes into, but whichever it is, it's impressive. He brings a lifetime's experience to the writing, both in terms of the accumulation of wisdom and also the immediacy of the autobiographical fragments, and throughout there’s such a lively mixture of playfulness, mindfulness and ingenious word play. I'm conscious, though, of the unflashy and well-considered way in which he constructs a poem, so that it seems natural rather than forced, and that’s always a reassuring sign in the age of creative writing classes. A good case in point is ‘Where There Only Ever Is’: Edward Thomas would be pleased with that one…
Stephen Stuart-Smith, Founder and Director, Enitharmon Press
Verified Purchase
Click to Share Links
Rating: 5.00 out of 5 (1 customer ratings)
Paperback eBook
£10.99
ISBN: 9781914151767
If you have a coupon code you can apply it after you have added items to the shopping cart.
Our eBooks are in the international standard ePub format which is used by most eBook reader devices and can be read on a wide choice of FREE APPs on smartphones, tablets and PCs.
We also publish on Amazon in their proprietary Kindle format.
We also publish on Amazon in their proprietary Kindle format.
Description
Lately is Stephen Yeo’s first collection of poems.
Alongside his poems, Stephen Yeo has published widely in the fields of co-operative, religious, voluntary, labour and socialist association. After teaching social history at the University of Sussex, he became Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford and Chair of the Manchester-based Cooperative College and of the Trust which looks after the Pioneers’ Museum in Rochdale and the National Co-operative Archive. As a founder of QueenSpark Books in Brighton, he helped to bring into being the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP).
Further details
98 pages
“Stephen Yeo’s poetry engages both the mind and the mind’s eye. It leads us through finely judged, often profound, reflections on human experience, culture and meaning making and into the spiritual realm. And it does so with story and image, a sincere questioning tone, and humour. Lately reads like something between spiritual exercises and a botanist’s almanac: and it adds to these a light touch that welcomes us in.”
~ Fiona Sampson, prize-winning poet and literary biographer
“Step into this gathering of Stephen Yeo’s poems and you
enter a room with animated conversations going on all round you – with history and horticulture, with love, loss, language, family and yes, boldly, unpretentiously, with God. You meet a restless and curious mind that wants to grasp the world whole, fired by a sense that poetry is the way to do it.”
~ Philip Gross, T.S. Eliot poetry prize winner 2009
“The distinction of Stephen Yeo’s poems is that they range widely across the things that matter in the world, bringing to bear on it a verbal adroitness and wit that bring everything to life. These are poems of principle that keep us amused
as they engage us.”
~ Bernard O’Donoghue, poet and Emeritus Fellow, Wadham College
“How do you make sense of a bewildering and often violent world, which may or may not be explainable in religious terms? Stephen’s remarkable poems memorialise a whole generation’s boyhoods in the shadow of the atom bomb, and consider too modern China, Auden, the power of nature and the necessity of hanging on to the best we know.”
~ Merryn Williams, poet, critic and translator
Rating: 5.00 out of 5 (1 customer ratings)
Reviews
Bernard O’Donoghue
marvellous
I have been enjoying and admiring Stephen Yeo's Lately hugely. The outcome of this project is marvellous. It is always moving to see poems you have admired finding their place in the full context of a book, and to find a fitness in the setting: poems like 'Sister. Future Perfect' and the poems following it in the section of 'Tributes and Aches' (which is a wonderful section as a whole) - Stephen Yeo makes great use of Shakespeare, but is very good with intertextuality altogether. 'An lllicit Ache' is one of those poems which capture a profound sentiment unforgettably: my favourite line is Flesh of my flesh, it's nothing personal.
I don't know of anyone else who could have written that; if I came across it in an anthology (which in due course perhaps we all may) I would have ascribed it to Stephen. It's the interweaving of Biblical language with the everyday. To quote Chaucer: 'ther is namore to say'.
Bernard O’Donoghue
Poet and Emeritus Fellow, Wadham College, Oxford
Verified Purchase
Stephen Stuart-Smith
Outstanding first collection
It's wonderful to reacquaint myself with Stephen Yeo's poems and I congratulate him on Lately, an absolutely outstanding first collection. What a glowing example of late maturity! There are a few examples on my list of poets who bided their time, or took to the art form in later life, and I'm not sure which category Stephen comes into, but whichever it is, it's impressive. He brings a lifetime's experience to the writing, both in terms of the accumulation of wisdom and also the immediacy of the autobiographical fragments, and throughout there’s such a lively mixture of playfulness, mindfulness and ingenious word play. I'm conscious, though, of the unflashy and well-considered way in which he constructs a poem, so that it seems natural rather than forced, and that’s always a reassuring sign in the age of creative writing classes. A good case in point is ‘Where There Only Ever Is’: Edward Thomas would be pleased with that one…
Stephen Stuart-Smith, Founder and Director, Enitharmon Press
Verified Purchase