Wry-blue Loves

The chronically invalid son of a robust sea-captain and novelist father, Tristan Corbiere (1845-75) published one book of verse and was virtually unheard of in his lifetime. He is an informal formalist, delighting in clashing registers of diction and outrageous puns. With pervasive self-mocking humour, his poems combine a hopeless love, a grounded sea-fever, a ferocious ironic compassion and a savage sympathy with dogs and underdogs. As Peter Dale writes in his introduction: 'Above all, he is his own man, able to resist the blandishments of literary theory, social expectations, and the mollifications of religion.' The book contains the entire "Les Amours jaunes" and a selection of Corbiere's uncollected poems.