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From The Neanderthal
Thorpe, Adam, From The Neanderthal
- GenresPoetry
55 pages, Paperback
First published July 15, 1999
7 people want to read
About the author
Adam Thorpe
53 books54 followersAdam Thorpe is a British poet, novelist, and playwright whose works also include short stories and radio dramas.
Adam Thorpe was born in Paris and grew up in India, Cameroon, and England. Graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1979, he founded a touring theatre company, then settled in London to teach drama and English literature.
His first collection of poetry, Mornings in the Baltic (1988), was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. His first novel, Ulverton (1992), an episodic work covering 350 years of English rural history, won great critical acclaim worldwide, including that of novelist John Fowles, who reviewed it in The Guardian, calling it "(...) the most interesting first novel I have read these last years". The novel was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for 1992.
Adam Thorpe lives in France with his wife and three children.
-Wikipedia
Adam Thorpe was born in Paris and grew up in India, Cameroon, and England. Graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1979, he founded a touring theatre company, then settled in London to teach drama and English literature.
His first collection of poetry, Mornings in the Baltic (1988), was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. His first novel, Ulverton (1992), an episodic work covering 350 years of English rural history, won great critical acclaim worldwide, including that of novelist John Fowles, who reviewed it in The Guardian, calling it "(...) the most interesting first novel I have read these last years". The novel was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for 1992.
Adam Thorpe lives in France with his wife and three children.
-Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 11, 2026
I really enjoyed this poetry collection.
Not only does it have a kind of thread going through the entire work, one that either blurs the distinction between past and future, or that delineates it more clearly – or both at the same time; but it is also stylistically confident, mostly rooted in the kind of Modernist expression that I think was there at its impetus but that many poets since have not understood and therefore failed to express (I, contentiously, think T.S. Eliot and James Joyce played a leading role in the decline and deterioration of Modernism rather than being the greatest examples of it, as some might argue).
There are also a few rare examples in this poetry collection of something most writers of any genre fail to grasp: the understanding of a child's view of reality. Most, when they write about children, have forgotten what it was like, and when they observe children, they redefine the child's experience into adult logic.
Though the children in these poems are observed through the lens of a parent, what they glimpse, for a moment, is the world through the child's eyes, and how that teaches us something significant that might change our own view of reality.
Not only does it have a kind of thread going through the entire work, one that either blurs the distinction between past and future, or that delineates it more clearly – or both at the same time; but it is also stylistically confident, mostly rooted in the kind of Modernist expression that I think was there at its impetus but that many poets since have not understood and therefore failed to express (I, contentiously, think T.S. Eliot and James Joyce played a leading role in the decline and deterioration of Modernism rather than being the greatest examples of it, as some might argue).
There are also a few rare examples in this poetry collection of something most writers of any genre fail to grasp: the understanding of a child's view of reality. Most, when they write about children, have forgotten what it was like, and when they observe children, they redefine the child's experience into adult logic.
Though the children in these poems are observed through the lens of a parent, what they glimpse, for a moment, is the world through the child's eyes, and how that teaches us something significant that might change our own view of reality.
Displaying 1 of 1 review