Roger Garfitt: Selected PoemsPaperback, 28 September 2000

Roger Garfitt has published sparingly but always to good effect. Selected Poems -- which includes important prose as well -- reveals the individual character of each poem and sequence, 'written only when the internal pressure demands and the slow pace of craft allows'. Carol Ann Duffy observed in the Guardian that 'he clearly believes, quite rightly, in the Muse and his approach has the patience of a journey-man's to his craft.'
Hard-won, but not austere, the poems are marked by tenderness and passion; quiet humour rather than irony runs through them. Sean O'Brien writes, 'He is both a meticulous re-creator of, for example, the effects of light, and a sociable poet who sees place as expressive of its inhabitants... The minuteness of his attention is often rewarding... an intriguing counterpart to the more public work of Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison.'
Extended extracts from the poet's journals evoke life in Bogotá during the Drug War and provide a moving account of the poet's return to landscapes he shared with his late wife, the poet Frances Horovitz.