What do you think?
Rate this book
Adrian Henri: Selected and Unpublished
Poet, painter of international repute, librettist, playwright, rock-and-roll provocateur, Adrian Henri was at the centre of Liverpool"s cultural awakening in the 1960s. Friend and confidante of Ginsberg and the Beats, Henri put on the first "happening" in the UK and his work formed one third of the The Mersey Sound - the best-selling poetry anthology of all time. This new volume presents a selection of the poet"s most famous work, as well as the unpublished collection he was working on at the time of his death. A selection of Henri"s paintings and reminiscences by critically acclaimed writers and long-time friends of Henri, such as Carol Ann Duffy and Roger McGough, round out this essential volume.
- GenresPoetry
320 pages, Paperback
First published February 15, 2007
6 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
Read
January 12, 2024Memorably described by his friend and fellow Liverpudlian George Melly as a ‘pear-shaped polymath’ Adrian Henri was one of the leading lights of the 1960s Liverpool poetry scene. The Liverpool poets took their inspiration from the American Beats but not their subject matter or style(s) which reflected their own lives, environments and preoccupations. They gave readings in pubs and coffee bars. They performed their poetry, but they were poets who wrote poetry people found entertaining, rather than performers who entertained through poetry. The distinction is subtle but important and distinguishes them from many of the ‘performance poets’ who emerged in their wake.
The Liverpool poets introduced new vocabulary and subject matter to poetry and a new and often young audience. Not that such innovation drew many plaudits from the English poetry establishment who tended to be dismissive - downright sniffy, in fact. You get the distinct impression that many of the Oxbridge educated literati felt the wrong sort of poetry was being written by the wrong sort of poets and appreciated by the wrong sort of readers. Not that it mattered. The poets themselves were largely indifferent to London literary opinion and, when Penguin published an anthology of work by Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten in 1967, it became an immediate bestseller. It’s still in print and has now sold over 500,000 copies. In some ways, though, it’s a shame these poets are always grouped together, as it tends to detract from the fact that each possessed a distinctive individual voice.
Adrian Henri was many things: painter, lecturer, organiser of happenings, art critic and curator, poet, rock star manque, playwright, bon viveur, disciple of Jarry, Breton, Apollinaire and T.S. Eliot. His love poems are often touching and sometimes funny. He was a painterly poet of landscapes both urban and bucolic. His poetry has many moods and forms. Sometimes short, direct, accessible and funny, but also epic, allusive, imagistic, fragmented and melancholic. The poems sometimes feel like notes in the margins of a crowded life, overflowing with experience, but they also transfigure and make universal that experience.
He was the only one of the famous three Liverpool poets who didn’t come from Liverpool, he was born in Birkenhead and grew up in Rhyl in North Wales, but also the only one who stayed there for the rest of his life. He once said that there was nowhere else he loved more. Not that there was anything remotely provincial about him. As reflected in many of the poems in this book he travelled widely. He was both a cosmopolitan and a modernist.
Liverpool features in many of these poems as muse, setting and subject matter. It is often a Liverpool made surreal and populated by Henri’s idols both historical and fictional. Pere Ubu walks across Lime Street and Marcel Proust dips Madeleine butties in his tea in a cafe. In ‘Mrs Albion, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’, written for Allen Ginsberg who Henri invited to Liverpool in 1965, the city becomes a young woman sitting on the banks of the Mersey ‘dangling her landing stage in the Water’. This wonderful poem captures a certain mid sixties moment - Merseybeat and English youth letting their collective hair down - with real warmth and wit.
He lived for many years in Liverpool 8, a then dilapidated inner city area composed of Georgian terraces and squares, and he mythologised it in his poetry. For Henri Liverpool 8 served as both an actual location and a poetic symbol of bohemianism. He observed Liverpool with the sharp eyes of the gifted painter he was, but it was always very much his Liverpool, reflecting his own preoccupations and life.
His poems are formally inventive and he frequently makes reference, direct or oblique, to his cultural idols or just anything that took his interest. ‘Me’ is a litany of people he would liked to have been and it’s startlingly eclectic - Rene Magritte, Bessie Smith, Bakunin and Blake are just a few of the name mentioned. He rewrites The Waste Land and composes poems in the form of talking blues. Poems are created through the collaging of found texts as Wordsworth collides with a car brochure. An apparently jokey piece about Batman, whose metre mimics the theme tune of the 1960s TV series, turns out to be an anti-Vietnam war poem.
The sensibility that emerges from his poetry is not populist but culturally omnivorous. Henri wanders cheerfully across the cultural landscape and finds much to love, inspire him and play with. He is indifferent to whether what interests him is categorised as ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’. It’s all grist to his poetic mill. Such an approach is now commonplace and identified by the term ‘post-modern’, but in the sixties it was novel and, as we have seen, not universally welcomed.
Henri was a superb reader of his poetry, his warm and unhurried voice gently drawing the listener in. Some of his poems were set to music by guitarist Andy Roberts. Of the recordings by the Liverpool Scene, the poetry-rock group he founded in the late sixties, I particularly recommend their interpretations of his poems America and The Entry of Christ into Liverpool. Happily, plenty of this stuff can be found online.
This beautifully presented book features a large selection of Henri’s poems from 1965 until his death in 2000 and includes previously unpublished poems. There are also colour reproductions of many of his excellent paintings some of which relate directly to the poetry.
Adrian Henri was much more than just a passing phenomenon of the 1960s and I strongly recommend these open-hearted, funny, clever and moving poems.
The Liverpool poets introduced new vocabulary and subject matter to poetry and a new and often young audience. Not that such innovation drew many plaudits from the English poetry establishment who tended to be dismissive - downright sniffy, in fact. You get the distinct impression that many of the Oxbridge educated literati felt the wrong sort of poetry was being written by the wrong sort of poets and appreciated by the wrong sort of readers. Not that it mattered. The poets themselves were largely indifferent to London literary opinion and, when Penguin published an anthology of work by Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten in 1967, it became an immediate bestseller. It’s still in print and has now sold over 500,000 copies. In some ways, though, it’s a shame these poets are always grouped together, as it tends to detract from the fact that each possessed a distinctive individual voice.
Adrian Henri was many things: painter, lecturer, organiser of happenings, art critic and curator, poet, rock star manque, playwright, bon viveur, disciple of Jarry, Breton, Apollinaire and T.S. Eliot. His love poems are often touching and sometimes funny. He was a painterly poet of landscapes both urban and bucolic. His poetry has many moods and forms. Sometimes short, direct, accessible and funny, but also epic, allusive, imagistic, fragmented and melancholic. The poems sometimes feel like notes in the margins of a crowded life, overflowing with experience, but they also transfigure and make universal that experience.
He was the only one of the famous three Liverpool poets who didn’t come from Liverpool, he was born in Birkenhead and grew up in Rhyl in North Wales, but also the only one who stayed there for the rest of his life. He once said that there was nowhere else he loved more. Not that there was anything remotely provincial about him. As reflected in many of the poems in this book he travelled widely. He was both a cosmopolitan and a modernist.
Liverpool features in many of these poems as muse, setting and subject matter. It is often a Liverpool made surreal and populated by Henri’s idols both historical and fictional. Pere Ubu walks across Lime Street and Marcel Proust dips Madeleine butties in his tea in a cafe. In ‘Mrs Albion, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’, written for Allen Ginsberg who Henri invited to Liverpool in 1965, the city becomes a young woman sitting on the banks of the Mersey ‘dangling her landing stage in the Water’. This wonderful poem captures a certain mid sixties moment - Merseybeat and English youth letting their collective hair down - with real warmth and wit.
He lived for many years in Liverpool 8, a then dilapidated inner city area composed of Georgian terraces and squares, and he mythologised it in his poetry. For Henri Liverpool 8 served as both an actual location and a poetic symbol of bohemianism. He observed Liverpool with the sharp eyes of the gifted painter he was, but it was always very much his Liverpool, reflecting his own preoccupations and life.
His poems are formally inventive and he frequently makes reference, direct or oblique, to his cultural idols or just anything that took his interest. ‘Me’ is a litany of people he would liked to have been and it’s startlingly eclectic - Rene Magritte, Bessie Smith, Bakunin and Blake are just a few of the name mentioned. He rewrites The Waste Land and composes poems in the form of talking blues. Poems are created through the collaging of found texts as Wordsworth collides with a car brochure. An apparently jokey piece about Batman, whose metre mimics the theme tune of the 1960s TV series, turns out to be an anti-Vietnam war poem.
The sensibility that emerges from his poetry is not populist but culturally omnivorous. Henri wanders cheerfully across the cultural landscape and finds much to love, inspire him and play with. He is indifferent to whether what interests him is categorised as ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’. It’s all grist to his poetic mill. Such an approach is now commonplace and identified by the term ‘post-modern’, but in the sixties it was novel and, as we have seen, not universally welcomed.
Henri was a superb reader of his poetry, his warm and unhurried voice gently drawing the listener in. Some of his poems were set to music by guitarist Andy Roberts. Of the recordings by the Liverpool Scene, the poetry-rock group he founded in the late sixties, I particularly recommend their interpretations of his poems America and The Entry of Christ into Liverpool. Happily, plenty of this stuff can be found online.
This beautifully presented book features a large selection of Henri’s poems from 1965 until his death in 2000 and includes previously unpublished poems. There are also colour reproductions of many of his excellent paintings some of which relate directly to the poetry.
Adrian Henri was much more than just a passing phenomenon of the 1960s and I strongly recommend these open-hearted, funny, clever and moving poems.
Displaying 1 of 1 review