Set Thy Love in Order ─ New & Selected Poems

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. Stephen Romer has been described as ‘one of our finest poets of thwarted or impossible love’ (Adam Thorpe in the Guardian) and the title of this New & Selected is a Dantescan objurgation as old as the Trecento: Ordina qu’est 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 a rueful wit, constitute so many variations on the theme.

Stephen Romer was born in Hertfordshire in 1957 and read English at Cambridge. Since 1981 he has lived in France, where he is Maître de Conférences at Tours University. He has held Visiting Fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge and has taught in the US. He has published four full collections, including Yellow Studio (2008), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He translates widely from the French, and has edited the Faber anthology Twentieth-Century French Poems.