This is the first volume in a five-volume edition of the complete poetical works of Ivor Gurney (1890-1937). Following an extensive study of all known manuscripts, the edition brings much of that work to publication for the first time. Since his death, much of his work has been censored or overlooked, his stylistic development towards modernism written off as the product of 'insanity' The availability of his complete poetry will change absolutely our understanding of Gurney's development, and the true nature of his poetry. It will lay bare his aspirations and pursuits as an artist in all its diversity, as a poet of war, of place, and of the asylum; a poet whose work has been celebrated by Geoffrey Hill for its 'incontestible grandeur'.
Volume I presents all of Gurney's poems written from March 1907 to December 1918. It begins with Gurney's earliest surviving verse, and ends, just after the Armistice, with his return to civilian life.