New Selected Poems

VERNON WATKINS was born on 27 June 1906, in Maesteg, South Wales. He lived most of his life on the Gower Peninsula, with his wife and five children, and earned his living working as a clerk for Lloyds Bank. During his lifetime six volumes of his poetry were published by Faber & Faber, with a seventh appearing posthumously. At his death he had won several major poetry prizes, was a visiting Professor of Poetry in America, and was being considered for Poet Laureate. He was friends with poets as diverse as: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Kathleen Raine, who considered him ‘the greatest lyric poet of my generation’. Vernon Watkins died in America on 8 October 1967.

RICHARD RAMSBOTHAM was born in Northumberland in 1962. He read English at Cambridge, and lectured in English at Warsaw University from 1989 to 1993. He teaches Speech and Drama for a living. He is the author of Who Wrote Bacon? William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I: A Mystery for the Twenty-First Century (Temple Lodge, 2004), and is currently writing the authorised biography of Vernon Watkins.