Complete Poems

Jon Silkin was born in London in 1930. After National Service and time as a manual labourer, he went to the University of Leeds as Gregory Fellow in Poetry. He founded Stand magazine in 1952 and the Northern House press in 1965. His publications included nine volumes of poetry and many critical works and anthologies: Out of Battle, his study of Rosenberg, Owen and other poets of the Great War, is a critical landmark. He held writing fellowships and chairs in the United States, Australia and Japan. Jon Silkin died in November 1997. Jon Glover was born in Sheffield in 1943 and grew up in south London. He studied English and Philosophy at the University of Leeds, where he met Jon Silkin and began a long association with Stand magazine, of which he is now Managing Editor. Jon Glover is an Honorary Fellow of the English Association, an Honorary Fellow of the School of English at the University of Leeds and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bolton, where he is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing. Kathryn Jenner graduated with a BA and MA from the University of Leeds before working as an archivist in the university’s Brotherton Library, where she catalogued the Jon Silkin archive and the poetry and notebooks of Geoffrey Hill.

'Complete Poems enjoins a new perception of Silkin’s language and concerns, the breadth of his passionately humane interrogation of war and the Holocaust, and his scrutiny of nature and humankind.' Jon Glover