Best Selling Books by Mervyn Peake

It is forty years since the death of Mervyn Peake (1911-68), the author of the much-loved Gormenghast novels. To mark the anniversary this first comprehensive edition of Peake''s poetry is published. It includes every black-and-white illustration he made for his verse, together with many previously unpublished drawings. Of the more than 230 poems in the collection, over 80 are printed for the first time. Robert Maslen''s detailed work on the manuscripts reveals the poems as a dazzling link between the fantasy world of Gormenghast and the narrative of Peake''s own life and of the turbulent times he lived in. Peake emerges as a compelling poet, with an acute sense of his responsibilities as an artist, passionately engaged with current events, from unemployment in the 1930s to the horrors of the London Blitz and the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. He is also a fine love-poet and a sensitive observer of the human form. Readers who love the world of Peake''s novels, and those who are new to his work, will discover here one of the great originals of the twentieth century.

''Nonsense'', wrote Mervyn Peake, ''can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere. It''s magic.'' Peake (1911-68) is one of the great English nonsense poets, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. His verses lead the reader into places where cause is cut free of effect and language takes on a giddy life of its own. Malicious bowler hats threaten their owners, a cake is chased across an ocean by a rakish knife, aunts become flatfish or live on sphagnum moss. Fully annotated, with a detailed introduction, Complete Nonsense contains all the poems and illustrations from Peake''s Book of Nonsense (1972), with forty unpublished poems discovered in manuscripts and thirty from uncollected sources, including all the nonsense verses from his novels. It reprints complete - for the first time and in colour - the words and images from Rhymes without Reason (1944), and Peake''s comic masterpiece Figures of Speech (1954). All the poems have been newly edited, often from Peake''s manuscripts, by Robert Maslen, editor of Peake''s Collected Poems (Carcanet), and Peter Winnington, the leading Peake scholar and biographer. Peake wrote of the rare art that glitters with the divine lunacy we call nonsense'': Complete Nonsense glitters with Peake''s benign and wayward imagination.