A Nip in the Air [Paperback]

Much of the originality of John Betjeman as a poet, apart from the unique assonance of his haunting verse forms, comes from the sharp and affectionate gusto with which he introduces his readers to the people and places in a poetic world he has made so much his own. He has few rivals in the personal harmonics he draws from his themes and from the natural world as the setting for human hopes and achievements in all their odd, humorous, and poignant trajectories.These new poems, most of them written over the last eight or nine years, are as varied and as captivating as evermore of that inimitable Betjeman counterpoint that makes a new collection an occasion: places, human encounters, meditations, entertaining verbal fisticuffs with public hates, threnodies on lost friends, and the pensive regard of familiar vistas that now draw their warmth and color from nearer horizons. The poet Philip Larkin wrote in