FLINTS
Poems by David Sutton

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David Sutton was born at Hemel Hempstead in 1944. He writes in the poetic tradition of Hardy, Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin. In 1969 Robert Graves called him “the best young poet in England”. His two previous collections of verse Out on a Limb (Rapp & Whiting, 1969) and Absences and Celebrations (Chatto & Windus, 1982), were extremely favourably received:

’The poems . . . have a lean and hungry look, deal expertly with dangerous subjects like love, and press their way into the memory without any fuss . . . Small surprise, then, that as long ago as 1969, Robert Graves called Sutton “the best young poet in England”.’
                                             Robert Nye, The Times

’He has the Larkinesque talent for hitting off the private, reflective contact with his environment with grace and exactitude.’
                                   Johnathan Raban, London Magazine

’It is good to come upon a poet, David Sutton, who can write with great skill of personal relationships and evanescent moments of insight which are contained by their form.’
                                   Elizabeth Jennings, Catholic Herald

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Meetings

Sometimes behind the words of those you meet
You come upon a lost unshareable
Hinterland: some slate-roofed town, mediaeval
In morning light, a suburb in the heat
Of summer dusk, a dalehead where they walked
Between moss-felted walls . . . it’s there so plain
You step like deer into this new terrain
Until you feel them falter, having talked
Some moments to you gone, so you return
From that deep journey back to surfaces
Yet ever after taste their lives like loss.
How can you tell them this? Unless, in turn,
You meet sometimes another watching too
Behind the words unshareable lost you.

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FLINTS
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: Samuel Palmer, ‘The White Cloud’, Drawing, 1831/32, size 14.4 x 16 cm. Brush in Indian ink over indications in pencil and brown ink. By courtesy of The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Publication: AUTUMN 1986 (48 pages laminated paperback)