Plums by Nicholas Bielby
Nicholas Bielby went from grammar school in Huddersfield to Cambridge, and then to teach in India. After that, he spent most of his working life in teacher education. After retiring from Leeds University, he was editor of the poetry magazine, Pennine Platform, for 15 years.
He has written four academic books and five previous books of poetry and has won numerous prizes in competitions, including the Arvon International and New Poetry.
Anne Stevenson has said, “Many of Nicholas Bielby’s poems are among the finest being written today… Each poem is more than its subject, each is a work of art in which the elements of life and language have undergone, like a chemical reaction, a transformation into something rich and strange.”
Dick Davis has said, “The pleasures (his) poems offer the reader are quiet, subtle and substantial, and all the more real and lasting for their innate honesty and modesty before their subjects.”
Professor Jefferson Holdridge says of this book, “Bielby has enriched English poetry throughout his life-long attention to the art. Plums has the hallmarks of his craft in its studied formal assurance, its wide-ranging consciousness and its deep historical knowledge… Throughout the poems, there is a well of sympathy for humanity’s Job-like capacity to endure. This sympathy is felt in poems both personal and philosophical, but linked to ageing now in ways that are profoundly moving.”
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