STUDYING GROSZ ON THE BUS
Poems by John Lucas

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John Lucas has published numerous works of criticism, including studies of Dickens and of modern English poetry. He was co-founder and editor of the Byron Press. Four pamphlet collections of his poems have appeared over the past twenty years. In 1975 his versions of the poems of Egil's Saga were published by Dent to widespread critical acclaim and re-published as an Everyman Classic in 1985. John Lucas has taught at Loughborough University and, when living in Nottingham, hs played cornet with local jazz bands. Studying Grosz On The Bus is his fist full collection of poems.

From review notices of earlier pamphlet collection and Egil's Saga:

“Lucas's poems are brilliant vignettes - perhaps the verse equivalent of Stanley Middleton's novels.”
Peter Porter, Observer

“Lucas is a first-rate verse craftsman . . . the poems, with that mixture of arrogance and humility that mark the true poet, announce not an embarkation but an arrival.”
G. S. Fraser

“Egil was a notable poet . . . and it is a distinction of the present translation that some of the beauty of his difficult poetry - wry, exultant, jesting, hateful, and mournful by turns - can still be appreciated by the English reader, thanks to the vivid, uninhibited versions supplied by John Lucas.”
Roberta Frank, Toronto Quarterly

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In Memory Of Louis Armstrong

There are such apt transcriptions of the notes:
each lippy trill or coda can suggest
a strutting insolence of slaves: like motes
they dance darkly in the beams of a late sun
falling on America’s promised west;

And the tight metal plunger mute’s a gun
stabbing precise bullets into the flesh
of Delta aristocracy, while fresh
bitter cadenzas spill like Creole blood.

By various routes – Bourbon, Basin, Beale -
We seek the just city on its green hill,
but when we get there it’s to find unreal
all but the man himself who, grinning, will
not understand our care. He lifts his horn
and though old walls don’t crack new worlds are born.

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STYDYING GROSZ ON THE BUS
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: George Grosz, 'A Married Couple', 1930. Watercolour, 66 x 47.3 cm / 26 x 18 5/8in. Tate Gallery, London. © DACS 1989
Publication: 1989 (64 pages laminated paperback)