W. S. Graham

He did casual jobs in Ireland, and worked as a munitions engineer in Glasgow during World War II. He was helped by the philanthropist David Archer, who published Graham's first collection "Cage Without Grievance" (1942), and facilitated friendships with the artists Jankel Adler (1895-1949), Robert Colquhoun (1914-62) and Robert MacBryde (1913-66) in Glasgow, and with John Minton (1917-57) and the poet Dylan Thomas (1914-53) in London.

Graham's early poetry, which he valued, has a stylistic affinity with that of Dylan Thomas. Graham also shared Thomas's taste for Bohemian life and heavy drinking. He was the father of a daughter, Rosalind, born in 1944 to Mary Harris, but he saw little of the child. After 1944 he lived chiefly in Cornwall.

Graham's principal publisher, beginning with "The White Threshold" (1949), was Faber and Faber, at which T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was a director. Eliot admired Graham's work, but said it was difficult and would sell slowly because people did not like to think. He worked for periods as a copywriter, fisherman, and auxiliary coastguard while at Gurnard's Head, but he concentrated himself almost exclusively on his poetry. He is said to have been an impressive reader of his own work, in public appearances he made in Britain and abroad. "Malcolm Mooney's Land" (1970) and "Implements In Their Places" (1977) were both Poetry Book Society choices.

In 1954 he married Agnes ("Nessie") Kilpatrick, daughter of David Dunsmuir, and from 1967 they lived at 4 Mountview Cottages, Madron. They had no children. Graham's collection "2ND Poems" (1945) was not his second collection; its title is a coded dedication "To Nessie Dunsmuir". Over the years Graham received small grants from the Arts Council, and he was granted a civil list pension of £500 per year in 1974. After a long illness with cancer, Graham died at Madron on 9 January 1986. Information for this page was kindly supplied by Graham's close friend and literary executor, Michael Seward Snow. AC

Cage without Grievance (Parton Press 1942); The Seven Journeys (William Maclellan 1944); 2ND Poems (Poetry London 1945); The Voyages of Alfred Wallis (1948); The White Threshold (Faber 1949); The Nightfishing (Faber 1955); Malcolm Mooney's Land (Faber 1970); Penguin Modern Poets 17 (Penguin 1970); Implements in their Places (Faber 1977); Collected Poems 1942-1977 (Faber 1979); Selected Poems (Ecco Press, New York 1980); Uncollected Poems (Greville Press 1990); Aimed at Nobody (Faber 1993); Selected Poems (Faber 1996); W S Graham selected by Nessie Dunsmuir (Greille Press 1998).

Selections from the Letters of W.S. Graham, edited by Michael and Margaret Snow (Caracanet, Autumn 1999);
Life and Works of W S Graham, edited by Peter Kravitz (Edinburgh Review 1987);
The Poetry of W S Graham. Tony Lopez (Edinburgh UP 1989);
The Constructed Space: a Celebration of the Poet W.S. Graham, edited by Jonathan Davidson and Ronnie Duncan (Jackson's Arm 1994).

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