Poems
Richard Craven writes sonnets, odes, epigrams and heroic couplets in which Elizabethan, Jacobean and Augustan forms are used for civic lament, literary burlesque and polemical satire. For Craven, metre is not ornamental nostalgia but structural principle: rhyme provides discipline while the subject matter attempts continually to befoul it.
Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian is a collection of 155 sonnets, conceived in 2016 as a project to write one more sonnet than Shakespeare’s 154. Since its completion the Odes, Epigrams & Further Sonnets have been gradually accumulating, with no particular completion envisaged. In the books the sonnets are numbered with Arabic numerals and the odes with Roman numerals. The heroic couplet satire (The Montpeliad and The Wokeiad) is listed last.
The first volume of the collected verse, Collected Shorter Verse Vol. 1, gathers the first tranche of Craven’s poetic work; it is described at the foot of this page.
Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian
Odes, Epigrams & Further Sonnets
- I – Ye Drunkenness of Knayves & Apprentyces atte Brygstowe
- II – Diverse Knaves & Harlots, at Dawn in Bristol, Having Drugged
- XVI – An Art Deco Hermit Grotto
- XVII – Sonnet 141 en englais, traduction de l’auteur
- XX – The cocaine sonnet
- XXIV – Sonnet Concerning a Banlieue
- XXVIII – A Sapphire in the Mud
Heroic couplet satire
Collected Shorter Verse Volume 1
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,…
The first volume of the collected verse, with readings by the author.