Published by Blackwell's 59pp
edited by Kingsley Amis, James Michie
with Foreword

In its last years with Blackwell's, OP experimented unhappily with various colour-schemes, and this one has red lettering on a light blue cover. The chapter "James Michie" of Amis's "Memoirs" briefly relates the editing of OP 1949: Amis suggested to Michie that "we could try just going into [Blackwell's] bookshop and asking" for the job, and so it proved. In the perennial complaint of OP editors, they wrote in their preface that "the typical furniture of the mass of poems [submitted] was not, as we soon came to wish it would be, the telegraph-pole and the rifle, but the amethyst and the syrup; the typical subject not the rehearsed response, but the beautiful rapture; the typical rhyme not of 'lackey' and 'lucky', but of 'bliss' and 'kiss'. All the efforts of the poets of the 'thirties had failed to throw the Georgian lumber out of the window. It is no consolation to think that bad poetry has always been written; it is the particular kind of badness which is depressing..."

Contents

Kingsley Amis: Foreword; Backgrounds;

Oliver Bayley: The Deserter; The Coming Morning; The Hop-Pickers;

C. E. B. Brett: "A prince once walked the sunlit streets of Rouen";

C. D. Cecil: On the Beach;

Michael Croft: Poem; A Private Sorrow;

Geoffrey Dutton: Alpenblumen; The Dead: A French Cemetery;

Peter Gammond: Autumn Elegy; Story of my Death;

Patrick Gardiner: Purbeck;

Mickey Hall: "My wells are never deep enough, it seems"; "We must be eagles, swift-pinioned thinkers";

W. J. Harvey: Elegy for Sidney Keyes;

Jack Hobbs: River; Napoleonism;

"Barbara James": "One morning I woke earlier than he";

Elizabeth Jennings: Weathercock; Estrangement; The Lucky; Modern Poet; Winter Love; Time;

Anthony Lodge: Loneliness;

Adrian Marston: Lagos: 1450; "See Poat the tobacconist airing his morning hymn";

"John Maskell": The Dark Pond;

Roderick McAdams: Channel in Summer;

James Michie: Foreword; "King Midas had a golden finger"; "Eye, dodging in your green Element"; "Cherish your girls and keep your women gentle";

E. G. Midgley: Islands;

P. A. T. O'Donnell: On Howth Cliffs; On Hearing a Scottish Choir;

Gillian Owen: Carillon;

G. B. Payman: Through the Morning Mist;

J. R. Pim: Calendar; Morning by the Lake;

M. B. Scragg: "Now that my hand is moving"; "The mild air contains me, a tower of flesh";

Michael Shanks: The Preacher;

Joseph Irving Wardle, as J. I. Wardle: Letter;

Peter Weitzman: The Discovery of Love; Juan;