The Sundial Press - Llewelyn Powys

Llewelyn Powys The Sundial Press - 2009


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Still Blue Beauty		Durdle Door to Dartmoor	Unclay	Kindness in a Corner	The Blackthorn Winter	Hester Craddock
Llewelyn Powys			T. F. Powys		Philippa Powys	Alyse Gregory
Llewelyn Powys Awake, open wide your entranced eyes. Let your limbs be fleet and your silver spears of joy never far from your hands.

				The author of twenty eight books, Llewelyn Powys might best be described as a ‘miscellaneous writer’: the author of a novel, a biography, travel books, works of popular philosophy, autobiographical memoirs, and, what he described as ‘an imaginary autobiography’, but it is arguably in the form of the essay that he most excelled. Llewelyn Powys is one of the rare writers who teach endurance of life as well as its enjoyment. Philip Larkin For those with wit to heed his calls to observe and consider, the rewards of reading Powys are apparent … He is a writer of often exquisite perception. The Times Literary Supplement It is Llewelyn Powys’s distinction of attitude, style and personality that makes his writing remarkable. Peter J. Foss (bibliographer) When Llewelyn Powys puts pen to paper, something miraculous happens with words. The New York Herald Tribune Civilisation needs men like Llewelyn Powys, such men who combine the austerity of a saint with the zest of a pagan. Ethel Mannin

Llewelyn Powys (1884 – 1939) was born in Dorchester, Dorset. A year later the family moved to the village of Montacute in Somerset where his father, the Rev. Charles Francis Powys, became rector and remained so for thirty three years. Powys was educated at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and then spent several years in Switzerland, Africa and the USA where he eventually established his career as a writer. While living in New York he met and married the novelist, Alyse Gregory, who was managing editor of the prestigious Dial magazine. In 1925 the couple moved to Dorset; firstly to the Coastguard Cottages on White Nore and then a short distance to Chydyok; an isolated farmhouse where his two sisters, the poet and novelist, Philippa Powys, and the artist, Gertrude Powys, occupied the adjacent cottage. A couple of miles to the south lay the valley village of East Chaldon where his brother, Theodore Powys, the author of novels, stories and fables, lived as well as the writers Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Garnett, the poets Valentine Ackland and Gamel Woolsey, and the sculptors Elizabeth Muntz and Stephen Tomlin, at varying times. Between the years 1937 to 1939 he published six collections of essays - Earth Memories, Damnable Opinions, Dorset Essays, The Twelve Months, Somerset Essays, and Rats in the Sacristy – and wrote sufficient to complete three further collections, A Baker’s Dozen, Swiss Essays, and Wessex Memories, all published posthumously. The Sundial Press has published fifty-two of his finest Wessex Essays - including four that appear in book form for the first time - in two attractive volumes selected, edited and arranged by Anthony Head and Frank Kibblewhite; both feature cover paintings by distinguished local artist Nicholas Hely Hutchinson. To read one of the previously uncollected essays from STILL BLUE BEAUTY please click on the following link The World Is New! which will open in a new window in PDF format. To read 'The Wessex of Llewelyn Powys' - an article that appeared in the Blackmore Vale Magazine in November 2007 - please click on the link which will also open in a new window in PDF format.

			From Herring Gulls (Durdle Door to Dartmoor): ‘Down at Lulworth Cove there is a notable old fisherman named Levi Miller who seldom goes out in his boat without a pair of herring gulls settling on the gunwale 'to hollo for the guts' of the fish he catches. On one occasion these birds fought so desperately over the head of a pilchard that the old man feared they would kill each other, and, leaving his pots and his oars, went to separate them, pulling them apart by their webbed feet as a market woman might separate a couple of truculent barn-yard cocks. How bright these birds can appear on a sunny morning! What a heartless, natural beauty they possess as they sit screaming for their lucent victuals under Bindon Hill. The sunlight glitters and gleams upon each rippling wave, the headlands shine, the white sails of the boats shine, and the draughts of fishes drawn up out of the sea resemble bars of quicksilver.’

Still Blue Beauty		Durdle Door to Dartmoor	Unclay	Kindness in a Corner	The Blackthorn Winter	Hester Craddock
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	2009