A.S.J. Tessimond (1902-1962) was once probably the most person, flexible and approachable voices in twentieth century poetry. inspired firstly by means of the Imagists, his poetry is outstanding for its lucidity and formal exactness and for its witty, humane depiction of lifestyles within the smooth urban. Out of step along with his contemporaries - either Pound and Eliot in addition to Auden and his fans - Tessimond used to be continuously a marginalised determine, publishing basically 3 collections in his lifetime, one in each one decade from 1934 to 1958. but his paintings has been renowned sufficient to be integrated in different anthologies and has been a perennial favorite with listeners of radio programmes similar to Poetry Please. This version is a reissue of the posthumous accrued Poems edited by means of his good friend the author Hubert Nicholson, who characterized his poems as 'beautiful, shapely, good wrought and chic, even if in public of personal mode', penetrating the center of either London and England: 'His hallmark, his distinct contribution to the physique poetic, is to be present in these poems encapsulating city types'and the associations that form and demarcate their lives, the preferred press and radio, movies, funds, ads, homes, tube stations, the implacable streets... He wrote plenty approximately love, its hopes and etasies and its frustrations and sadness.' As Nicholson has mentioned, Tessimond wrote many poems within the first individual, 'but they don't seem to be the least bit egotistical. they're imaginitive projections of himself into varieties, areas, generalised guy, even God or Fate.' He used to be 'entirely a guy of the city', his 'landscape' items depicting Hyde Park nook, Chelsea Embankment, a Paris cafe or even an overcrowded bus in Jamaica. 'He enjoyed the existence round him and was once a meditative in addition to an observant guy. He mirrored, and mirrored on, the passing convey, kindly, in truth, and with wit and wisdom.' Tessimond has been defined as an eccentric, a night-lifer, loner and flaneur. He enjoyed ladies, was once constantly falling in love, yet by no means married. He suffered from widespread bouts of melancholy, alleviated neither via a succession of psychiatrists nor via electrical surprise remedy. the truth that he was once stricken by self-doubt and used to be fiercely serious of his personal paintings should have contributed to his paintings being too little released and an excessive amount of missed, regardless of being championed through a rare number of admirers, from Michael Roberts, John Lehmann and Ceri Richards to Bernard Levin, Maggie Smith, invoice Deedes and Trevor McDonald. Maggie Smith learn his poem 'Heaven' on the funeral of Bernard Levin, for whom Tessimond used to be 'a quiet voice, which makes it effortless to overlook the resonances, yet they're there, and even though I doubt if he'll in attaining a frequent reputation, i'm certain that any destiny anthology of twentieth-century English verse that doesn't comprise a pattern of his paintings could be much less whole, much less consultant and no more worthwhile than it can have been.' In an obituary for the days, Tessimond's pal, the critic George Rostrevor Hamilton, acknowledged he was once 'modest approximately his poetry, and occasionally notion it too small to be invaluable. yet over and above a dry wit and fancy, he had a fantastic feeling for phrases, meticulous yet, like himself, with out affectation. In his personal approach he was once unrivalled.'