Set Thy Love in Order

Set Thy Love in Order? gathers the work of some thirty years, taken from Stephen Romer's four previous collections, along with a substantial selection of new poems. The title is a Dantesque imperative as old as the Trecento: Ordina questo amore, O tu che m'?ami??- set thy love in order, o thou who lovest me. Romer's central theme is encapsulated by these words, and his prolonged and painstaking exploration of the 'intermittences of the heart', frequently carried out with a Francophile self-consciousness and rueful wit, constitute so many variations on the theme. Romer's New & Selected articulates the constant oscillation between love, loss and longing, and the religious desire for 'refuge' or 'higher things', and how powerfully these can come to rhythm the life of the mind and the emotions. His more recent work has included poems of love and mourning for his parents, and elegies for friends. Derek Mahon singled out Romer's first collection Idols for its 'emotional candour and intellectual clarity', and since then the poet has endeavoured to turn the light of the intellect (and the wit) on the frequently chaotic and contradictory material of the heart. 'Romer is one of our finest contemporary poets because he has made such a distinctive idiom out of such a complicated inheritance.' ADAM PHILLIPS 'Notwithstanding his sophisticated Francophile masks and semi-detached Englishness - and his philosophical eye on the emotions - Stephen Romer may well be the finest love poet of his generation.' THE BRITISH COUNCIL WRITER'S DIRECTORY

Stephen Romer was born in Hertfordshire in 1957 and read English at Cambridge. Since 1981? he has lived in France, where he is Maître de Conférences at Tours University. He has held Visiting Fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge and has taught in the United States. He has published four full collections, including Yellow Studio (2008), shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. He translates widely from the French, and has edited the Faber anthology Twentieth-Century French Poems. Recently he has published translations of Yves Bonnefoy's The Arrière-pays (2012) and an anthology of French Decadent Tales (2013). Currently he is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He was elected frsl in 2011.