Set Thy Love in Order

*Stephen is well known for his Faber anthology Twentieth-century French Poems, his reviews andessays*His fifth collection follows on the success of his acclaimed Yellow Studio and is - always - aboutlove*Shortlisted for the 2008 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, he has judged the Stephen Spender TranslationPrize*The Guardian includes Stephen among 'the finest poets of thwarted or impossible love'*For 25 years he has been Maitre de conferences at the University of Tours, France

In Set Thy Love in Order Stephen Romer’s poetry is as pressing and urgent as ever. The spirit, still unappeased and peregrine, searches for places of refuge, mostly from itself, and finds them, temporarily, in love, in art and in mourning.

Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems gathers the work of some thirty years, taken from Stephen Romer’s four previous collections, along with a substantial selection of new poems.
The title is a Dantesque imperative as old as the Trecento: Ordina questo amore, O tu che m’ ami – set thy love in order, o thou who lovest me. Romer’s central theme is encapsulated by these words, and his prolonged and painstaking exploration of the ‘intermittences of the heart’, frequently carried out with a Francophile self-consciousness and rueful wit, constitute so many variations on the theme.
Romer’s New & Selected articulates the constant oscillation between love, loss and longing, and the religious desire for ‘refuge’ or ‘higher things’, and how powerfully these can come to rhythm the life of the mind and the emotions. His more recent work has included poems of love and mourning for his parents, and elegies for friends.
Derek Mahon singled out Romer’s first collection Idols for its ‘emotional candour and intellectual clarity’, and since then the poet has endeavoured to turn the light of the intellect (and the wit) on the frequently chaotic and contradictory material of the he