Gavin Ewart (1916-1995) was born in London. He received his BA and MA from Christ’s College, Cambridge. His first poetry was published when he was seventeen, in Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse. He published one book of poems before World War II, his next volume didn’t come out until 1964. In 1991 he received the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse.
Gavin Ewart, one of Britain’s finest and most original poets, is presented here in a half-century retrospective. His subjects various and his approach toothsomely scathing, he believes: “good light verse is better than bad heavy verse any day of the week.” Consider one of his briefest poems, “The Lover Reflects: Afterwards” – “Perhaps I was greedy. I know I should be grateful/You wanted a snack and I wanted a plateful." An inventive technical master (creator of the “Ewart” form), he stalks his favorite prey––hypocrisy, love’s foibles, the “pseuds”––with a razor-sharp wit. “There is iron in irony, although you smile,” he writes in one poem: “…I have my language, you have yours/ a lower-archy is a hierarchy viewed from above.”
