Ted Walker (Ted Edward Joseph Walker) Biography

British poet, born in Lancing, Sussex, educated at St John's College, Cambridge. In 1962, with John Cotton, he founded the magazine Priapus. His first full collection, Fox on a Barn Door (1965), rapidly established him as a formidable talent extending the tradition of English nature poetry. The essential landscapes of his work, the Sussex coastline and remote inland locations, were defined in this volume and have sustained much of his subsequent writing. Several further collections have included The Solitaries (1967), Gloves to the Hangman (1973), and Burning the Ivy (1978). Walker's poetry is capable of an economy and impact of imagery that make his treatments of the brutality he apprehends in nature disturbing and memorable. His earlier poetry was often tautly musical in its habitual use of strict forms, though sometimes an element of constraint ensued. After The Night Bathers (1970), his third collection, a more colloquial and discursive tone emerged in his writing. Hands at a Live Fire: Selected Poems appeared in 1987. The High Path (1982) is a prose work combining autobiography and Walker's impressions of his native West Sussex. He also published a collection of short stories entitled You've never Heard Me Sing (1983), and wrote plays for television and radio. The Last of England (1992) is an autobiography.