Greatest Hits

Adrian Mitchell's poetry’s simplicity, clarity, passion and humour show his allegiance to a vital, popular tradition embracing William Blake as well as the ballads and the blues. His most nakedly political poems – about war, Vietnam, prisons and racism – became part of the folklore of the Left, sung and recited at demonstrations and mass rallies. His childlike questioning was a constant reminder from the 60s onwards that poetry is first and foremost an assertion of the human spirit. A pacifist prophet who remained true to his heartfelt beliefs, Mitchell reported back for over half a century from a world blighted by war, compromise, double-talk and pragmatism without losing his innocence, integrity and impish sense of humour. Angela Carter described him as a ‘joyous, acrid and demotic tumbling lyricist Pied Piper determinedly singing us away from catastrophe’. This book brings together the forty poems which have proved most popular with audiences. It includes such well-known works as To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies about Vietnam), Victor Jara of Chile, On the Beach at Cambridge, Stufferation (I Like that Stuff), Celia, Celia, and Beattie Is Three. The poems are interspersed with Adrian's own commentaries on how he came to write them. Now out of print, all the poems in Greatest Hits are included in Come On Everybody: Poems 1953-2008.