Collected Poems and Translations

'Robert Wells's language is exact, the experience of the poem is deeply gone through, there is a constant desire to adhere to the truth as he apprehended it rather than to glamorize it. The inexpressible becomes expressed. At one point I started marking my favourite poems, but I like so many of them that I gave up.'
Thom Gunn

'Wells is a quiet poet... he inherits the tender, threatening profundity of Edward Thomas.'
Anne Stevenson

'Robert Wells understands how finely man and nature are moulded to each other... The healing loneliness of hills and waters, and the solitary figures who move among them - bathers, wood-cutters, hay harvesters - are the setting and characters of Wells's poems.'
George Mackay Brown

Robert Wells has always had a quietly determined and original take on the pastoral tradition. Through his excellent translations of the Idylls of Theocritus and Virgil's Georgics (both gathered together at the end of this collection), as well as through his own poetry, for more than 30 years he has pursued the question of landscape, how it might be lived in and worked in, recorded and celebrated. And, closely connected with this, his writing has sought to find common ground with the way landscape has been experienced and described in the past.
The story of his fascination began at school with his reading of the Georgics. This immensely influential poem is immersed in the patterns and practicalities of farming in first-century BC Italy and, as Wells explains in a note to his translation, it had a strong impact on his own life. Wells's early writing describes his life as a woodsman on the Exmoor coast. The poems are clear and precise, full of repeated descriptions of fire as, time and again, they carefully scrutinise the burning of the scrubs and trees he has cut down and cleared: "Fire crystallises about evergreen stems.