The Letters of A. R. D Fairburn

A.R.D. Fairburn (1904-1957) was a poet, satirist and critic whose varied career (insurance clerk, free-lance journalist, Farmers' Union secretary, radio scriptwriter, craftsman, English tutor and art lecturer) gives a bare indication of the range of his interests. While his fellow poets Curnow, Brasch and Glover saw themselves as guardians of High Culture during the forties and fifties, Fairburn assumed the broarder role of 'artist citizen'. HIs energy in those years went as much into the writing of articles and essays on the state of the arts as into the production of the lyric and satiric poetry on which his reputation rests, a generation after his death.

Lauris Edmond has attempted, in her selection of 237 letters out of the nine hundred in the Turnbull library, to do justice to the complex and engaging personality of their writer. The bulk of the letters are concerned with literary matters, but many of the remainder - to politicians, public servants, editors and businessmen - take up the cudgels in support of causes or in protest at injustice. Fairburn's often salty wit is balanced by honesty and a ready and genuine compassion. The early letters especially paint an intimate portrait of the poet as a young man, while the later ones encompass aspects of the literary, social and political life of this country during its fromative years.

The editor, Lauris Edmond, is well known both as a poet and critic. She has published five volumes of verse, including The Pear Tree (1977) and Salt from the North (OUP1980), and in 1981 was the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton.

- from the inside cover.

Published by Oxford University Press, 1981. 1st edition.
Very good secondhand condition, but with some discolouration of the otherwise intact dust-jacket.