Synopsis "Collected Poems: 1944-1979 (New York Review Books Poets)"
Kingsley Amiss poetry tackles all the grimly humorous subjects he tackled in his novelslust, lost love, booze, money and the lack of it, old age, deathand does so with immense formal poise. A master of both traditional and unconventional meters with a perfect ear for parody, Amis wrote satires, epigrams, and rueful songs of love and loss that are remarkable not only for their virtuosity and humor but for their scabrous realism. It all adds up to a small, entirely individual, and memorably bracing body of work. Amis writes: Beauty, they tell me, is a dangerous thing, / Whose touch will burn, but Im asbestos, see? We know he is anything but.
