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Powys Society Publication List Powys titles currently in print A Visit to The National Library of Wales
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Supplement to Powys Checklist & Readers’ Guide, 2010 A leaflet, in PDF format which will open in a new window, intended to remedy some of the gaps and errors in our third edition of the Powys Checklist and Reader's Guide by Alan Howe, revised and extended by Stephen Powys Marks, and to bring it up to date to the end of 2009. Please click here to download. Paperback editions of two major JCP novels from Duckworth in 2010 MAIDEN CASTLE in paperback 25 Mar 2010 £16.99 ISBN: 978-0715638910 496 pages PORIUS in paperback 22 July 2010 £18.95 ISBN-13: 978-0715637326 768 pages Two further titles in the Powys Heritage series from Cecil Woolf T. F. Powys’s Favourite Bookseller: The Story of Charles Lahr by Chris Gostick. 32pp. (ISBN 978-1-907286-01-8) Encounters with John Cowper Powys, a Meditation by Christiane Poussier. 28pp. (ISBN 978-1-907286-00-1) £6.00 each. Direct from the publisher Cecil Woolf. (A review of both titles appears in the current issue of the Society's Newsletter, No.68). For further details of both booklets please click here LITERARY SOMERSET - A Readers' Guide by James Crowden
Paperback, 195 x 220 mm, 272 pages, 150 colour illustrations £18.95 ISBN 978-0-9562778-0-0 Literary Somerset explores the literary highways and byways of Somerset, including the cities of Bath and Bristol. Writer and poet James Crowden has produced an intellectual road map of Somerset from Anglo-Saxon times up to the present day. Here you will find more than 300 writers: early chroniclers and opium addicted Romantic poets, philosophers, pirates and playwrights, eccentric clergymen, diarists and herbalists, novelists and historians, travellers, chefs and scientists.
Many of these literary connections are well known: TS Eliot and East Coker, Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Quantocks; but did you know that Thomas Hardy once lived in Yeovil; or that Virginia Woolf had her honeymoon in Holford; or that John Steinbeck lived near Bruton to research the Arthurian legends; … or that JRR Tolkein had his honeymoon in Clevedon and that Cheddar Gorge inspired Helm’s Deep in Lord of the Rings?
Many of the First World War poets, such as Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas came to Somerset; Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol; Siegfried Sassoon is buried in Mells. There is even the story of Breaker Morant, the Bridgwater-born Bush poet who was executed by firing squad during the Boer war. Speke of the Nile is buried in Dowlish Wake. Then there are the Waughs and the Powys clan. Aubrey Herbert even turned down the throne of Albania twice in favour of Dulverton and Yeovil! For more details about Literary Somerset visit www.james-crowden.co.uk
More 2009 Publications THE POWYS JOURNAL Volume XIX contains articles by Glen Cavaliero, Arjen Mulder, W.J. Keith, John Dunn, Angelika Reichmann, Jonas Holm Aagaard, Stephen Powys Marks, Timothy Hyman, with three reviews of the new edition of PORIUS from Ian Duncan, Richard Maxwell and Charles Lock. Also included are three more previously unpublished short stories ('A Pleasant View', 'Our Aunt', 'The Haunted Hill') by T. F. Powys with an Afterword by Elaine Mencher. £6.00 inc. p&p (included as part of annual membership sub.)
Weymouth Sands, first published in 1934, draws on the author’s vivid childhood memories of the seaside town to create a haunting backdrop for a tale of epic significance and power. The novel follows the story of Jobber Skald, whose obsessive desire to kill the magnate of the town in vengeance for his contempt for the local quarry workers is balanced by a redeeming love for a young girl from the Channel Isles. Alongside these unforgettable protagonists, the novel boasts a range of remarkable human oddities, including a famous clown and his mad brother, a naïve Latin teacher and an abortionist. The intricate interweaving of these characters’ lives is suffused with Powys’ compassion for the variety, eccentricity and loneliness of human beings, and offers a moving counterpoint to the vast questions addressed by the novel, from the power of Eros and the inscrutability of the universe to the nature of madness. ‘Thousands of baby boom readers who grew up with Tolkein now want to spend their mature adulthood with the chronicles of Powys.’ The Independent ‘An intricate, provocative and living example of the novel which takes people as it finds them ... The cool, calm impersonability of Weymouth Sands, and the author’s all but diabolical power to peer beneath the surface, combine to make it a book of moment.’ The New York Times ~ Duckworth also plan to publish Maiden Castle in paperback in March 2010. The Liminal Landscape of John Cowper Powys An article by David Ride Source: Time and Mind, Volume 2, Number 1, March 2009, pp. 71-76(6) Publisher: Berg Publishers The concept of liminality, the mystic properties of boundaries and thresholds, is discussed in relation to various landscape elements such as water/land interfaces, enclaves, and islands. Reasons are given to identify the Dorset setting of John Cowper Powys's novel Wolf Solent as a liminal landscape. The literary mechanisms Powys employs to achieve this status are described: they include defining a circumscribed area by means of towns referred to by their real names; renaming places within this boundary to assign special meaning to them; and naming his characters with geological and topographical terms, and with the names of animals and plants. In an overtly liminal event, the novel's hero, Wolf Solent, named after a strait off the coast of Hampshire, marries Gerda, identified here as a personification of the Wessex countryside. The novel is Powys's most autobiographical, and so sheds light on his own philosophy, an uneasy amalgam of atheism and mysticism. The full text electronic article is available for purchase by download from: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/tmdj/2009/00000002/00000001/art00004
Published by The Powys Society: ASPECTS OF JOHN COWPER POWY'S OWEN GLENDOWER by W. J. Keith Bill Keith, Emeritus Professor of English at Toronto University, has written extensively on John Cowper Powys, and will be familiar to many members of the society from his talks at annual conferences. His readers’ guides to Autobiography, A Glastonbury Romance, Porius, and Owen Glendower can be downloaded from the Powys Society website. The Society has now published his monograph, “Aspects of John Cowper Powys’s Owen Glendower”, which explores the background and nature of this enthralling but often baffling and controversial novel. Bill Keith describes the historical background to the novel and its ties to ancient Welsh mythology, the gestation and publication of the book, its ties to the historical novels of Walter Scott and to Shakespeare, and its contemporary relevance. A paperback of 96 pages priced at £4.75 (including postage) ISBN 978-1874559351 To purchase a copy and pay by cheque please print out an order form click here. 2008 8 John Cowper Powys Novels reprinted Faber & Faber's print-on-demand imprint, Faber Finds, has issued eight of John Cowper Powys's novels in paperback priced around £15.00. Wood and Stone was John Cowper Powys' first novel published in 1915. It is no prentice-work however - the author was already in his forties. The novel is set in the area of south Somerset that John Cowper Powys grew up in. The village of Nevilton is based on Montacute where his father was vicar for many years. When he wrote it Powys was living in the USA and it is perhaps this absence that accounts for the heightened vividness of the descriptive writing. Powys deploys a large and wonderfully delineated cast of characters. They are loosely divided between 'the well-constituted' and 'the ill-constituted'. Characteristically Powys favours the latter. Paperback. £22.00 ISBN: 0571243150 Rodmoor is unusually for a John Cowper Powys novel set in East Anglia, Rodmoor itself being a coastal village. The protagonist, Adrian Sorio, is a typically Powys-like hero, highly-strung with only precarious mental stability. He is in love with two women, Nance Herrick and the more unconventional Phillipa Renshaw. This was Powys' second novel published in 1916. It deploys a rich and memorable cast of characters. Paperback. £17.00 ISBN: 0571242170 After My Fashion has an unusual publishing history. Although it was John Cowper Powys' third novel written in 1920, it wasn't published until 1980. It seems that when his US publisher turned it down, Powys made no effort to place it elsewhere. Indeed, when Powys had finished a book, he tended to be oddly indifferent to its fate. The novel has two other unusual features: its locations (Sussex and Greenwich Village) and Isadora Duncan being the inspiration for Elise, the dancer and mistress of the protagonist, Richard Storm (based quite largely on Powys himself). As one would expect from Powys, the writing is vivid, not least in the descriptions of the Sussex landscape and the bohemian milieu of Greenwich Village. Paperback. £15.00 ISBN: 0571242111 Ducdame was John Cowper Powys' fourth novel published in 1925. It is set in Dorset. The protagonist, Rook Ashover (a wonderfully Powysian name) is an introverted young squire with a dilemma: to go on loving his mistress, Netta Page, or, make a respectable marriage and produce an heir. Of his early novels (pre Wolf Solent), this one is often considered to be the most carefully constructed and best organized. Like them all it contains a gallery of rich, complex characters and glorious writing. Paperback. £15.00 ISBN: 0571242146 To read an article on The Early Novels of John Cowper Powys by Morine Krissdóttir please click here Morwyn First published in 1937, John Cowper Powys originally wanted to call this novel ‘Hell’. One can see why. Powys was a fervent opponent of vivisection, ‘man’s most vicious cruelty’, and here, in this strange fantasy, he gives full vent to his feelings. The main adventures are set in Hell where the narrator, not named but clearly based on Powys himself, his dog, Black Peter, Morwyn, his new love and her father, a vivisector find themselves hurled after a cataclysm on a Welsh mountain-side. The infernal adventures and encounters are virtuoso displays of Powys’s extraordinary knowledge of the mythical underworld. Atlantis Published in 1954, John Cowper Powys called this novel, a 'long romance about Odysseus in his extreme old age, hoisting sail once more from Ithaca'. As usual there is a large cast of human characters but Powys also gives life and speech to inanimates such as a stone pillar, a wooden club, and an olive shoot. The descent to the drowned world of Atlantis towards the end of the novel is memorably described, indeed, Powys himself called it 'the best part of the book'. Many of Powys's themes, such as the benefits of matriarchy, the wickedness of priests and the evils of modern science which condones vivisection are given full rein in this odd but compelling work. The Brazen Head In this panoramic novel of Friar Roger Bacon, John Cowper Powys displays his genius at its most fecund. First published in 1956, this novel, set in thirteenth-century Wessex, is an amalgam of all the qualities that make John Cowper Powys unique. The love-story of Lil-Umbra and Raymond de Laon, and the quest of the Mongolian giant, Peleg, for Ghosta, the girl seen, loved, and lost on the battlefield, are intermingled with the historical, theological and magical threads which form the brocade of this novel. Dominating all is the mysterious creation of Roger Bacon one of the boldest as well as most intricate of Powys' world-changing inventions. Professor G. Wilson Knight called this 'A book of wisdom and wonders'. The Inmates 'What I've tried to do in this tale is to invent a group of really mad people who have the fantastic and grotesquely humorous extravagance that, afer all, is an element in life'. So wrote John Cowper Powys himself in his prefatory note to this novel first published in 1952. In this 'wild book' Powys creates a 'Philosophy of the Demented' expressing fundamental truths about madness and sanity. Most of the novel, though, like so much of his later fiction, it is more a fantasy, takes place in Glint Hall, a lunatic asylum. The two main characters are John Hush and Tenna Sheer. They fall in love. The rapidly developing, psychologically complex narrative centres on 'Hush's organization of a conspiracy of revolt amongst the most fantastically crazy of the inmates'. It makes for a strange, disturbing, and yet, at times, funny read. To read an article on The Late Novels of John Cowper Powys by Morine Krissdóttir please click here JOHN COWPER POWYS AND THE MAGICAL QUEST A paperback edition of John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest by Morine Krissdóttir was published by Faber Finds on 16 April 2009. [ISBN: 9780571251063 - 220 pages - Price: £16.00] __________________________________________________________________________
John Cowper Powys Letters From CECIL WOOLF Publishers two long-awaited additions to the Uniform Edition of the Collected Letters of John Cowper Powys:
The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Dorothy Richardson
(edited by Janet Fouli)
The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman
(edited by David Goodway)
Available from: Cecil Woolf Publishers. 1 Mornington Place, London
NW1 7RP Both volumes were reviewed in the July 2008 issue of the Newsletter and can be read online here. Jeff Bursey's review of The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman can be read here
For further details of both titles and a SPECIAL OFFER TO MEMBERS OF THE POWYS SOCIETY please click here.
UNCLAY and KINDNESS IN A CORNER Paperback editions of two T. F. Powys novels have been published by The Sundial Press UNCLAY (with an Introduction by John Gray) KINDNESS IN A CORNER (with an Introduction by Glen Cavaliero) The first reprint of UNCLAY since its original publication (1931) and its first appearance in paperback. The first reprint of KINDNESS IN A CORNER since 1941. “In my view, Unclay is Powys's crowning achievement, since it contains the fullest artistic expression of his meditations on life, beauty, evil, love, and death.” - Marius Buning (author of T.F. Powys: A Modern Allegorist) ‘Theodore Powys is a master of English, and for this, for the exquisite texture of expression, he should be read, if for nothing else. But the reading will disclose much else, and especially a genius so rare it seems not of this earth, a humanness of spirit not frequently to be encountered, and a wit so exotic it will seem at times little other than perverse. And Kindness in a Corner displays all the Powys characteristics in their fullness and at their best.’ – New York Times Both are available directly from the publisher. Click here for a link RETHINKING POWYS
Critical Essays on John Cowper Powys
(Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781861711670 A new collection of essays. H.W. Fawkner's essay ìVenusî explores issues of reading, movement, love and sex, the 'amorous self', and affectivity in A Glastonbury Romance. Ian Hughes looks at the genre of Powys's novels, and how the philosophical romances were influenced by Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean. Janina Nordius discusses the crucial Powys theme of (transcendental) solitude in the key novel of the Powys-self alone, Wolf Solent. Joe Boulter's essay concentrates on the affinities between modernism and postmodernism, pragmatism and deconstruction, in one of Powys's late novels, The Inmates, via thinkers such as William James, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. From Crescent Moon Publishing P.O. Box 393, Maidstone, Kent, ME14 5XU Website: www.crescentmoon.org.uk Also published by Crescent Moon on 1st Feb 2008, a revised edition in paperback (116 pages) of Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity by H.W. Fawkner. £10.00 WESSEX ESSAYS Published in 2008, an attractive second volume of twenty-six Wessex Essays by Llewelyn Powys STILL BLUE BEAUTY in paperback at £9.99 from The Sundial Press ISBN-13: 9780955152375 (lncluding four previously uncollected essays)
CONTENTS: The Sea! The Sea! The Sea! - Lodmoor - The Memory of One Day - A Stonehenge in Miniature - The Father of Dorset - A Pond - High Chaldon - A Royal Rebel - Somerset Names - Montacute Hill - The Village Shop - The Wordsworths in Dorset - The World Is New! - A Visit by Moonlight - Shaftesbury: Champion of the Poor - A Wish for Freedom - Athelney: In the Steps of King Alfred - Wookey Hole - Green Corners of Dorset - Recollections of Thomas Hardy - A Foolish Razorbill - A Richer Treasure - Weymouth Memories - The Shambles Fog-Horn - Dorchester Lives
Companion volume DURDLE DOOR TO DARTMOOR Wessex Essays of Llewelyn Powys in paperback at £9.99 from The Sundial Press ISBN-13: 9780955152344 CONTENTS: The Durdle Door - The White Nose - A Bronze Age Valley - Bats Head -The Fossil Forest - The Castle Park of East Lulworth - St Aldhelm’s Head - Studland - Corfe Castle - Herring Gulls - Stalbridge Rectory - The River Yeo - Cerne Abbas - Stinsford Churchyard - The Grave of William Barnes - Weymouth Harbour - Portland - A Famous Wreck - Hardy’s Monument - The Swannery Bell at Abbotsbury - Lyme Regis - Montacute House - Ham Hill - On the Other Side of the Quantocks - Exmoor - Dartmoor |
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