A.S.J. Tessimond (1902-1962) was once essentially the most person, flexible and approachable voices in twentieth century poetry. inspired first and foremost by way of the Imagists, his poetry is outstanding for its lucidity and formal exactness and for its witty, humane depiction of existence within the smooth urban. Out of step together with his contemporaries - either Pound and Eliot in addition to Auden and his fans - Tessimond used to be continually a marginalised determine, publishing merely 3 collections in his lifetime, one in each one decade from 1934 to 1958. but his paintings has been well known adequate to be integrated in different anthologies and has been a perennial favorite with listeners of radio programmes equivalent to Poetry Please. This version is a reissue of the posthumous gathered Poems edited by way of his good friend the author Hubert Nicholson, who characterized his poems as 'beautiful, shapely, good wrought and stylish, no matter if in public of personal mode', penetrating the center of either London and England: 'His hallmark, his designated 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, advertisements, homes, tube stations, the implacable streets... He wrote lots 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 aren't the least bit egotistical. they're creative projections of himself into varieties, locations, 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 used to be a meditative in addition to an observant guy. He mirrored, and mirrored on, the passing exhibit, kindly, in truth, and with wit and wisdom.' Tessimond has been defined as an eccentric, a night-lifer, loner and flaneur. He enjoyed girls, was once constantly falling in love, yet by no means married. He suffered from common bouts of melancholy, alleviated neither by way of a succession of psychiatrists nor by way of electrical surprise treatment. the truth that he used to be tormented 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 ignored, regardless of being championed by way of a unprecedented 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 popularity, i'm yes that any destiny anthology of twentieth-century English verse that doesn't contain a pattern of his paintings should be much less entire, much less consultant and no more invaluable than it might probably have been.' In an obituary for the days, Tessimond's good friend, the critic George Rostrevor Hamilton, acknowledged he used to be 'modest approximately his poetry, and occasionally concept it too small to be precious. yet over and above a dry wit and fancy, he had a lovely feeling for phrases, meticulous yet, like himself, with no affectation. In his personal method he used to be unrivalled.'