Collected Poems

Christopher Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford, and then taught at the University of Zurich, at King's College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Holderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann and many others. Over the last two decades Carcanet has published six books of his poems, Intimate Chronicles (1996), one book of his experimental prose and two volumes of essays, as well as his Selected Writings and Faint Harps and Silver Voices, a collection of verse translations.He has received various awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.

His work is at once rich and sparse, elegantly economic in its subtle shifts from discrete object to discrete object, yet, by contrast with mainstream English realism, striking for the boldness and brio of its imaginings.Terry Eagleton, Standa poet with a disconcerting knack of making it new in almost every poemJohn Lucas, New Statesman