Books of Powysian Interest from other Publishers

Oliver Rimmer’s recently completed PhD thesis examines how Emma Goldman, John Cowper Powys, and Margaret Anderson use personal and autobiographical writing to form liberating, egalitarian relationships with their readers. Though each writer is closely tied to modernism, their work has often been overlooked, partly due to critics’ failure to recognize its anarchist foundations. Tracing the influence of Goldman and Powys on Anderson and The Little Review, Rimmer explores how all three infuse their writing with individuality and intimacy. In doing so, they invite readers to engage in shared self-discovery and reveal the anarchist and modernist belief in the transformative power of reading.

We congratulate Oliver on completing his PhD Thesis at the University of Sussex. Oliver is a member of the Powys Society, and we look forward to hearing him speak at our 2027 Summer Conference.

Link to University of Sussex download page

Thomas Henry Lyon (1869–1953) was an important architect whose work has often been ignored, because he did not take up the Modernist ideas of many of his contemporaries. His work was also almost entirely concentrated in either Cambridge or the edge of Dartmoor. His contribution to the inter-War development of the Colleges of Cambridge was immense and often overlooked: this book seeks to restore his reputation.

Available from Sacristy Press

Published 6 March 2023: Anthony Swindell covers T.F. Powys as part of this Volume 22 in the series Studies of the Bible and Its Reception.

From the publisher’s overview:

This book supplies an overview of the literary reception of the Bible from the earliest times right through to contemporary writers such as Jeanette Winterson and Colm Tóibín, traces the literary reception and treatment of the Book of Job; the figure of Uriah in the narrative of David and Bathsheba; the figure of Lilith; and Angels of Death and of Mercy. These are all handled as specimen histories. This is followed by an examination of the output of several specific early and later Twentieth-Century rewriters of the Bible.

Author information

Anthony Swindell lives in Mid Wales and is Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Chester and Area Editor (Literature) of the Encyclopedia of the Bible & Its Reception (EBR).

See full details on the de Gruyter publisher’s website.

A translation into French by Judith Coppel of JCP’s The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant; with a preface by Denis Grozdanovitch.

Link to Publisher’s website for ordering:

Editions la Baconnière

A-t-on le droit d’être heureux alors qu’il existe tant de souffrances dans le monde? Est-il possible d’être heureux alors que les dogmes de toutes sortes – religions et sciences confondues – imposent plus que jamais leurs «vérités» au détriment de nos illusions personnelles ? Y a-t-il une place pour des instants de bonheur à l’heure où la compétition pour la sacro-sainte réussite sociale se fait de plus en plus sévère?

We are very pleased to see how well JCP is being received in France. Congratulations to all concerned.

International Medievalisms: from Nationalism to Activism, edited by Mary Boyle. Boydell & Brewer

This collection identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands, ‘Internationally Nationalist’, ‘Someone Else’s Past?’, and ‘Activist Medievalism’, exploring medievalist media from the textual to the architectural. Subjects range from The Green Children of Woolpit to Refugee Tales, and from Viking metal to Joan of Arc.

Felix Taylor, author of ‘John Cowper Powys and the Anti-vivisection Movement’ (The Powys Journal XXIX, 2019) and speaker on JCP and Welsh Mythology at our 2022 conference, has contributed a chapter on John Cowper Powys and Wales in Maiden Castle.

Link to publisher‘s page.

see Persephone Books description

A Well Full of Leaves is about a family of four children growing up somewhere in the north of England, with an utterly vile mother who is cruel to her children, self-centred, and deplorable.

“It isn’t everyone who has a mother like ours. She was a specialist whose specialities never touched the kind, the gentle, or the constructive. She was at her best when she was toppling the entire scene. All her dislike of us and the world in general was extended into whatever she was doing. Under her hands soapsuds were angry, clothes sneered, steam menaced, crockery raved…”

see Persephone Books descripton

As It Was consists of two short, beautifully written memoirs, As It Was (1926) and World Without End (1931). They are about Helen Thomas’s life with the poet Edward Thomas. In the first book they meet, fall in love, make love, and get married. The second describes their life until the day Edward left to return to the trenches in France. Read together, they are a powerful love story written with extraordinary frankness for the time.

Published by Handheld Press on 20 May 2021

Frances Bingham’s new book is the definitive biography of this remarkable gender-rebel, poet and Dorset resident, who was the partner of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Valentine was a dedicated writer, deeply involved with Communism during the 1930s, a volunteer in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and an environmentalist and peace campaigner. Recently released MI5 files show that she was blacklisted for confidential work during the Second World War, and remained under long-term surveillance, as much for her ‘abnormality’ as for her politics.

The biography includes references to T.F. Powys, Katie Powys, Llewelyn Powys, and Francis Powys who were intimately connected with Ackland, Warner and their circle.

‘Frances Bingham [is] Ackland’s critical guardian angel.’ Ali Smith, TLS

Republished by Zephyr Press, Nov 2019

In this extraordinary piece all of John Cowper Powys’ eccentric and wild inventiveness is on display. In a small flat in New York in the 1920s (Patchin Place — see above) an old couple, former circus performers, live a crotchety life of poverty and fear. The ones they fear are ‘the Authorities’, their name for the cruel and unthinking denizens of the outside world who want to put them into a home.

With a saucy combination of ghoulishness and bouncing enthusiasm John Cowper Powys revels here in unbounded invention, creating a short masterpiece of great eccentricity and capacious fantasy, which was first published in a limited edition in Chicago in 1930. 

The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain. Tr. Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams. Penguin Classics 2019

A source of inspiration for John Cowper Powys, this book deserves our salute. The call for ‘poetic imagination’ from the translators’ introduction eloquently propounds the Powysian values we uphold.

From the Introduction:
“ The figure of Taliesin and the wildly diverse poetic material of the Llyvyr Taliessin continue to be of persistent and compelling interest as we try to imagine the nature of imagination itself. We are regularly reminded that we currently live in a ‘disenchanted’ age — which seems to mean that we are condemned to see the world around us as a storehouse of raw material for self-gratifying human projects, and the remote history and residually remembered myths we inherit as, at best, decorative fancies and, at worst, hangovers from an embarrassingly unsophisticated past. The Taliesin poems insist, in a voice that is passionate, sometimes derisively challenging, sometimes breathtakingly fresh, adventurous and musical, that such disenchantment is simply a way of settling down into a drab and reductive version of who we are and what our world is. We hardly need these days to underline the practical effects of this reductive approach, in the devastation of our environment, the brutal erosion of the rights and dignities of indigenous peoples and the sheer frantic hollowness at the heart of the so-called developed world. In such a world, poetic imagination is no idle luxury: the poet is the person who is most intensely and fully aligned with the hidden energy and spirit that pervades our world, and we are poorer and less human if we try to sideline or ignore this truth.”

She Shall Have Music was Alyse Gregory’s first novel published in 1926 while she was Managing Editor of The Dial. The book draws from Gregory’s real life, gives her a platform for examining her feminist beliefs and, strangely enough, foreshadows the consequences of her choices.
With an introduction by Janice Gregory.

‘Very few writers create a world of their own. John Cowper Powys was one of this select company, and the world he fashioned is like nothing else in literature. Anyone who wants to explore this strange, magical and yet somehow earthily realistic alternative reality should begin by reading Powysland’. — John Gray

First paperback edition

The Sundial Press

The Sundial Press is an independent publisher with a programme of reprints of early-twentieth-century books with new introductions, including works by Alyse Gregory (Hester Craddock and King Log & Lady Lea), Llewelyn Powys (two volumes of Wessex Essays and CHRISTMAS LORE AND LEGEND Yuletide Essays), Theodore Powys (Unclay and Kindness in a Corner), Philippa Powys (The Blackthorn Winter and Sorrel Barn & The Tragedy of Budvale) and Littleton Powys (The Joy Of It) plus The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett (with a previously omitted chapter and an Introduction by J. Lawrence Mitchell) and the previously unpublished Patterns on the Sand by Gamel Woolsey (with an Introduction by Barbara Ozieblo).

Strike, £15.00 (paperback)

Jack Clemo is best known as a poet – one of the most extraordinary poets of the twentieth century. His novel Wilding Graft (1948) was admired by T.F. Powys; the two corresponded and met. In his second volume of autobiography, The Marriage of a Rebel (1980), Clemo’s sense of kinship with T. F. Powys – to whom he also dedicated a poem, ‘A Kindred Battlefield’ – is made explicit: ‘He too had chosen the unworldly borderline, the terrible wrestle with God.’

Clay Phoenix is the first biography of Clemo, and it is the first study to draw from Clemo’s extensive archives; an archive that includes sixty years of diaries, letters (including to and from Charles Causley, Cecil Day Lewis, Mary Whitehouse, AL Rowse, Frances Bellerby, TF Powys, George MacBeth and Sir Arthur Quiller Couch), manuscripts of every volume of Clemo’s work and a large photograph collection. — Luke Thompson lectures at Falmouth University.

Troubador Publishing. £11.99 (paperback) £24.99 (hardback)

“Cavaliero is a poet with much to offer, shrewd in his observation of human nature and technically assured in his articulation of relatively figurative emotions and sensations” – Glyn Pursglove, Acumen

“Sharply observant… [His poems] have that sense of place which such poetry needs” – John Betjeman

“Cavaliero is one of the master-shapers of the English stanza” – Charles Lock, Poetry Salzburg Review

A revision of Jamoussi’s 1971 doctoral thesis,
available from: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Price: £47.99. Dr Jamoussi was a lecturer at The University of Tunis.

From John Gray’s introduction: ‘These essays celebrate the life of the spirit – not by turning to an otherworldly realm, or retreating into the shadowy depths of the mind, but by standing still and looking anew at the sun and rain and the changing seasons.

As Powys shows, the human spirit is reborn when it sees the natural world as it actually is – a spectacle of inexhaustible beauty.’ 

See the society’s publications page.

Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, Maiden Castle, Owen Glendower, Porius — all scanned to a very high standard.

The Powys Society honors its mission to keep these masterpieces in print.

Old Africa Books (September 2012)

The poet and diarist Mary Casey (1915-1980) was the niece of John Cowper, Theodore Francis and Llewelyn Powys. After her marriage to Gerard Casey she followed him to Kenya, where he was working as a farm assistant for her uncle and godfather W.E. (Will) Powys. The title of this selection from Mary Casey’s African journals Under the Shadow of the Oath refers to the Mau Mau Uprising, which started in 1952. By then the Caseys were well established on their own farm on the slopes of Mount Kenya just above a forest reserve, a hiding-place for dangerous wild animals as well as the Mau Mau, but as Mary Casey writes ‘ … if you have to spend your days with people who have taken blood-curling oaths for your destruction the only possible way to carry on is as if everything was as usual, apart from what seem reasonable precautions.’ Her journals offered often a refuge and meant to her ‘above all a transmutation by poetic thought of grief into some kind of tragic drama; of joy in the elements into song’.

See review by Jeremy Hooker

DURDLE DOOR TO DARTMOOR

CONTENTS: The Durdle Door – The White Nose – A Bronze Age Valley – Bats Head -The Fossil Forest – The Castle Park of East Lulworth – St Aldhelm’s Head – Studland – Corfe Castle – Herring Gulls – Stalbridge Rectory – The River Yeo – Cerne Abbas – Stinsford Churchyard – The Grave of William Barnes – Weymouth Harbour – Portland – A Famous Wreck – Hardy’s Monument – The Swannery Bell at Abbotsbury – Lyme Regis – Montacute House – Ham Hill – On the Other Side of the Quantocks – Exmoor – Dartmoor.

STILL BLUE BEAUTY, paperback £9.99 from The Sundial Press. (An attractive second volume of twenty-six Wessex Essays, including four previously uncollected)

CONTENTS: The Sea! The Sea! The Sea! – Lodmoor – The Memory of One Day – A Stonehenge in Miniature – The Father of Dorset – A Pond – High Chaldon – A Royal Rebel – Somerset Names – Montacute Hill – The Village Shop – The Wordsworths in Dorset – The World Is New! – A Visit by Moonlight – Shaftesbury: Champion of the Poor – A Wish for Freedom – Athelney: In the Steps of King Alfred – Wookey Hole – Green Corners of Dorset – Recollections of Thomas Hardy – A Foolish Razorbill – A Richer Treasure – Weymouth Memories – The Shambles Fog-Horn – Dorchester Lives.