Harwood, Lee

(1939- )

   He was born and grew up in Chertsey, Surrey, and studied English at Queen Mary College, University of London. He has lived many years in Brighton, Sussex, except for a few years spent in the USA and Greece. He has had several occupations: monumental mason, librarian, bookshop assistant, post office counter clerk, and railway man. His writing career started in the early 1960s and since then he has published over 20 volumes of poetry and prose, as well as translations of the Rumanian-born French poet Tristan Tzara. "He makes use of avant-garde poetic techniques not to dramatize a radical skepticism about language or meaning, but in order to recover for poetry the kinds of "directness" or expressive energy postmodernism has taught us to distrust" (Mark Ford, The Guardian, 18 September 2004). Some of his recent publications: Monster Masks, 1985. Crossing the frozen river: selected poems, 1988. Rope boy to the rescue, 1988. Morning Light, 1993. Slow Dancer Press, 1998. Collected Poems, 1975-2000, 2004. Some of his poems: "Czech Dream," "Salt Water," "Soft White," "The Blue Mosque," "The Words."

   Sources: Antholog y of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry. Keith Tuma, ed. Oxford University Press, 2001. British Electronic Poetry Centre (http://www.soton.ac.uk/Harwood, Leebepc/index.htm). Collected Poems with Wolf Tongue: Poems 1975-2000. Shearsman Books, 2004. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The New British Poetry, 1968-88. Gillian Allnutt, Fred D'Aguiar and Ken Edwards, eds. Grafton Books, 1989. The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse. Stephen Coote, ed. Penguin Books, 1983.