Jubilation (Oxford Poets) Book

In this, his fourth collection of poems in seven years, Charles Tomlinson explores themes of youth in aging as well as continuities provided by family life and shared interests. Recently retired from Bristol University and winner of the Bennett Award for achievement in literature from The Hudson Review in 1993, Tomlinson has titled this book Jubilation, a pun on the Spanish word jubilación, meaning retirement. Often referred to as a poet of landscape, Tomlinson's scrupulous form and enduring tone are present throughout poems that take the reader from Japan to Portugal, from Italy to the United States. Yet the poems are engaged in a dialectic between roots and wandering signaled expressly in his poem Against Travel. In the final poem On the Late Plane, we are in the air on a journey across America; from the sky we are looking down on the star pattern of human presence made by the city lights below. Tomlinson's poetry is at once international and distinctly English in its idiom; nowhere is this fascinating paradox more present than this collection.Read More