New & Selected Poems

Samuel Menashe’s poetry has a mysterious simplicity, a spiritual intensity and a lingering emotional force. For over 50 years he practised his art of ‘compression and crystallisation’ (in Derek Mahon’s phrase) in poems that are brief in form but profound in their engagement with ultimate questions. As Stephen Spender wrote, Menashe ‘compresses thought into language intense and clear as diamonds’. Intensely musical and rigorously constructed, Menashe’s work stands apart in its solitary meditative power, but it is equally a poetry of the everyday. The humblest of objects, the minutest of natural forms, here become powerfully suggestive, and even the shortest of the poems are spacious in the perspectives they open. Expanded from its original Library of America compilation, this edition covers the full range of his work, from the early collections to very recent work, and includes a DVD of Life Is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe, a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce. This features a visit to Menashe in the tiny apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village where he lived from the 1950s until 2009. Even in his 80s, Menashe still knew all his poems by heart, and between engaging digressions on poetry, life and death, recites numerous examples with engaging humour, warmth and zest.

'Menashe is essentially a religious poet, though one without an orthodox creed. Nearly every poem he has ever published radiates a heightened religious awareness' - Dana Gioia.

Samuel Menashe (1925-2011) was born in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. He served in the US infantry during the Second World War, and afterwards studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. He returned to New York in the 1950s where, apart from frequent sojourns in Britain, Ireland and Europe, he lived in a tiny "cold water" apartment until a year and a half before his death – at the age of 85 – in 2011. He was first published in Britain, thanks to Kathleen Raine, in 1961, before he achieved any recognition in America, where he remained a marginal figure over five decades. In 1996 a selection of his work was published in the Penguin Modern Poets series. In 2004 he became the first winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Neglected Masters Award, a prize that both paid tribute to his excellence and made reparation for the years in which his achievements were overlooked. His New and Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks, was published by the Library of America in 2005. An expanded edition, published with Life Is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe, a film on DVD by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2009.