Lives the Sea Had Left is the first publication of the collected poems of Ted Walker (1934-2004). All of the poems that appeared in Fox on a Barn Door (1965), The Solitaries (1967), The Night Bathers (1970), Gloves to the Hangman (1973), Burning the Ivy (1978) and Mangoes on the Moon (1999) are here. This volume, edited by the poet’s son, includes an introductory appreciation which provides insights into Ted Walker’s life. Many of his poems were first published in The New Yorker.
Critical introductions to each collection and notes that illuminate the history and development of the poems make this the essential volume for admirers of Walker’s poetic work.
Walker’s poetry won praise for its nature imagery; through the lives of animals, it explores aspects of the human condition such as fatherhood, loneliness and human labour in poems including ‘By the Saltings’, ‘Moths’ and ‘Ox’.
His fascination with the coast – the shingle and sand of Lancing beach and the Adur estuary at Shoreham – is best explained by Walker’s childhood: he grew up at a time when they were all strictly off-limits, mined and guarded against a possible invasion. In his autobiographical The High Path he writes, “This, then, was what Peace was: to stand and gaze at the unsinister sea; to pick up a streamer of bladder-wrack and watch it lift with the wind.”
Walker’s poetry also explores grief and loss, while the later volumes broaden their geographical horizons beyond Sussex to the Welsh countryside, Spain and Australia.