At the Garden’s Dark Edge: Selected Poems

Anthony Thwaite (1930-2021) was one of the most formidable voices in postwar English letters. Deeply esteemed by fellow poets and critics for his original and technically controlled poetry, Thwaite composed in traditional forms, with orderly stanzas, rhyme schemes, and metrical lines that scan. His voice was highly personal, cautiously intimate, and often witty, and he wrote with a gratifying clarity and freedom from abstraction, making him among the most accessible of modern poets.

At the Garden’s Dark Edge is a collection of a hundred of Thwaite’s poems, selected from a span of more than sixty years, exploring his major themes and recurring topics--among them, the consolations of domestic life, the pleasures of language and creativity, and the many humans and other animals in his life. He was inspired by travel and life abroad--most notably Libya, Japan, and the American South--and his poems deeply engage the individuals and cultures he encountered. A lifelong archaeologist, Thwaite also explored the ruins of the past and what we may recover by exploring it. Intriguingly, his work also faces life’s most vexing questions from the perspective of a serious Christian faith.

This volume contains several poems that have never been reprinted or collected, and one that has never before been published. By making his work more accessible than ever before, At the Garden’s Dark Edge aims to introduce Anthony Thwaite to a new generation of readers and preserve his legacy for future generations. A preface by playwright and novelist Michael Frayn accompanies an editor’s introduction.

Anthony Thwaite (1930-2021) was a prolific postwar English poet and critic, widely known for his editing and commentary on the collected poems and letters of his friend Philip Larkin.

Kevin J. Gardner is Professor and Department Chair in the English Department at Baylor University whose work focuses on eighteenth- and twentieth-century British literature.