ALPHABET
Poems by Stanley Cook

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Alphabet derives from the authors work on concrete poems with intending teachers and from writing poems for Infants (“a neglected audience”) for the B.B.C. programme ‘Poetry Corner’. The poems here address themselves to the adult intelligence. Stanley Cook writes in his Introduction: “Letters of the alphabet are the first gods of literature . . . My Alphabet is intended as worship of the pantheon of (at least) twenty-six gods.”

Reviewing the author’s Form Photograph The Teacher wrote: “NO TEACHER SHOULD BE WITHOUT A COPY.”

Stanley Cook was born in a South Yorkshire village in 1922. He read English at Oxford and, after teaching in schools in Lancashire and Yorkshire, became a lecturer at Huddersfield Polytechnic. In 1972 he was the winner – from a field of over 1,200 – of the Cheltenham Festival / Sunday Telegraph “Poem For Our Time” (£100) Poetry Prize.

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A

A the Great, the aggressor of the alphabet,
Is a fighting animal with antlers locked
In a push-of-war, a hero in horned helmet
At the head of every attack.


Z

According to the dictionary
It would be wrong to surprized
That it wouldn’t be contemporary
To baptize, evangelize and civilize.

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ALPHABET
Price £4.95 per copy post free (£3.30 post free to Associate Members)
Publication: 1976 (64 pages laminated paperback)