Collected Shorter Verse: Volume 1

By Richard Craven

Richard Craven writes as if the last two centuries were a ghastly misunderstanding -and he's here to put things right.

Collected Shorter Verse Vol. 1 gathers the first tranche of Craven's poetic work, drawing from the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian and the Odes, Epigrams & Further Sonnets. What emerges is a dual corpus of iambic attack, civic lament, and philosophical invective. The sonnets are formally impeccable and morally exasperated; the epigrams cut with Augustan precision; the couplets march in step with Pope, Dryden, and Swift- only to find themselves parked outside a Travelodge on the M4.

A literary traditionalist with a taste for provocation, Craven does not deploy meter as ornament but as armature: rhyme as rigour, form as fidelity. His verse defends the architecture of classical poetics while gleefully soiling its soft furnishings. It is erudite, scurrilous, and composed with a craftsman's pride in each line's turning.

A rare achievement: learned, lacerating, and metrical to the bone.

Richard Craven is a British-Canadian writer and former academic philosopher who has lived in Bristol for over two decades. Since leaving academia, he has devoted himself to the twin pursuits of mordant literary satire and the restoration of formal verse for a modern audience. Collected Shorter Verse Vol. 1 stands in defiant opposition to the fashions of contemporary poetics.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FHJ36PS1
• ISBN13: 9798291950456
• Release Date: July 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"