Rounding the Horn, such seas
as made my mother wince.
I slept on down below,
but have been on deck since.
   

Jon Stallworthy, the son and grandson of New Zealanders, rounded the Horn en route to his birth in London. He began writing poems at seven, during - and about - the Second World War. The conflict and his colonial inheritance gave him a sense of 'the round earth's imagined corners' and the presence of the past which informs such of his best-known work as 'No Ordinary Sunday', 'A Letter from Berlin' and 'The Almond Tree'.

His first book established him as a poet with 'a gift few poets possess, and which all poets wish for - the ability to strike out a memorable and epigrammatic line which is at once simple and deeply
disturbing' (Critical Quarterly). That has remained the hallmark of his subsequent books which continue to command a place in all the major anthologies. Now, to coincide with the publication of a memoir, Singing School (John Murray), Stallworthy has made a comprehensive selection of what Poetry Review described as
'snatches of radio traffic from this century's storms, true stories, and some of the storytelling
inspired'.