Redesigned and reissued in 2017 to celebrate the 'Burgess Centenary' -
100 years of Anthony Burgess
Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems captures the full range and
achievement of Anthony Burgess's poetry and verse. It is as daring,
original and inventive as the name suggests. The work explores themes of
violence and love, pretensions and emotion, sex and war and is both
sobering, and hysterically funny.
The author of major novels, essays and reviews, the lecturer whose
dazzling take on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land changed our reading of the
poem, is - like Eliot himself - a prosodic genius and a musical
aficionado. Here are extracts from Burgess's translations of the
librettos of Carmen, Oberon and others; of verse dramas including Cyrano
de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, Chatsky; and his original musicals
Trotsky's in New York!, Mozart and the Wolf Gang and A Clockwork Orange:
A Play with Music among others. Here too are his wonderful translations
of the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Belli, extracts from his verse epic
Moses, the complete poems of F. X. Enderby, occasional poems for
Vladimir Nabokov and Ogden Nash... And we encounter the poems of young
John Burgess Wilson, from the Manchester student journal The Serpent.
Add to this the autobiographical poem 'The Sword', his New York Times
verses about the Apollo II moon landing, a verse fragment from his
abandoned novel It is the Miller's Daughter - his fans and new readers
will be left with a sense of the scale, wit and accomplishment of one of
the great creative originals of the twentieth century.
