Alan Brownjohn is a poet, translator, novelist, editor, and critic, and currently the chairman of the Poetry Society of Great Britain. He first came to prominence as a member of The Group in the late 1960s but seems closer in style to the Movement poets of the mid-1950s. His Collected Poems 1952-83 (1983) are impressive in their cumulative effect: Brownjohn emerges as postwar British society's most accurate recorder and its most penetrating satirist. He brings a similar questioning intelligence to bear on personal relationships, winning an increasing reputation as a subtle and inventive love poet.

The son of Charles Henry and Dorothy Mulligan Brownjohn, he was born in Catford in South East London, "the last member of four generations of printers": "My fathers handled founts of words/ My brain would catch and fingers lose." Catford combined a humble respectability with the independence of the socialist, nonconformist tradition. Brownjohn's...