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Sam Gilbert was born in 1979. Although it was clear from an early age that he had a lively and enquiring mind, he showed little interest in fiction, let alone poetry. His preferred reading was factual. This all changed suddenly in his early teenage years at Dean Close School. Perhaps under the influence of a number of fine teachers, he began to read voraciously, in both prose and verse, and soon to write poetry. At first, much of his writing was influenced by the prevailing fashion for "grunge" and was correspondingly bleak, but it was not long before his poems acquired a facility of language, a command of form and of rhyme, a range and a lyricism rare in one so young. By the age of seventeen, he was writing poems of which any experienced poet could be proud. Alison Brackenbury has remarked upon his rare ability to write strong story poems about other people as well as poems about love and the personal concerns more typical of the work of young poets.

The selection in this volume, just over ninety poems, represents perhaps rather less than two thirds of his surviving output written before he was twenty, together with a small handful of poems written in the months following his twentieth birthday. Certainly, they stand up well beside the adolescent work of even major poets such as Auden and Larkin, but, more to the point, many of them deserve to be much more widely read on their own merits without taking any account of the age of the poet when he wrote them.


Please note: this book is subject to longer lead times than advertised above. Please allow up to 21 days for delivery.

Edited by: Robin Taylor Gilbert