Alan Jenkins's White Nights gathers together the translations, "imitations" and versions - mostly from French poets - that he has worked on intermittently for 25 years, with a handful of longer poems, previously unpublished or published underground. Jenkins speaks of difficult passions, loneliness, lovers and friends lost to time and death; he pays homage, with gratitude and a profound sympathy if not always with reverence, to those poets from the past who have been his truest companions. Praise for Alan Jenkins "These beautifully rhymed and metered verses provide an image of the 'accelerated grimace' of our day - indeed, this is a composite portrait, like one of Hockney's Polaroid assemblages, of a lonely, bitter dandy, the Spare Man, a black rosebud in his silk lapel. I love these poems." - Edmund White

Author Biography

Alan Jenkins was born in Surrey in 1955 and has lived for most of his life in London. He studied at the University of Sussex and has worked for the Times Literary Supplement since 1981, first as poetry and fiction editor, then as deputy editor. He was also a poetry critic for The Observer and the Independent on Sunday from 1985-1990, and has taught creative writing in the USA, London and Paris.