David Gascoyne's classic text of 1935 was the first comprehensive work on Surrealism to be published in English. His membership of the Surrealist movement and his association with its leading members - among them André Breton, Paul Eduard, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí - placed him in the ideal position to witness and record the development and significance of its foremost writers and artists. David Gascoyne lived in France in 1937-39, 1947-8 and 1953-64, during which time he became one of the most distinguished of British poets and translators. His other Enitharmon books include Selected Poems, Selected Verse Translations, Selected...

David Gascoyne’s international reputation rests on his outstanding achievement as poet and translator. The publication of his Selected Prose in his 82nd year was an event of major literary significance. Reading this remarkable collection, the harvest of some sixty years, which includes long-inaccessible contributions to journals and magazines together with previously unpublished material, we can appreciate for the first time the breadth and consistent quality of Gascoyne’s elegant and eloquent prose writings. They reflect his continuing engagement with the changing context of his times, and his close involvement with and response to luminary figures in twentieth-century art and literature.  

This New Collected Poems, compiled by Gascoyne’s friend and editor Roger Scott, comprises work that the poet chose to preserve, together with uncollected and unpublished material; all meticulously researched from notebooks and manuscripts held in the British Library and internationally in academic institutions. It falls to present-day readers of Gascoyne’s poems to experience the impact of his work, to recognize its significance in twentieth-century literature, and its continuing relevance.  

David Gascoyne’s Paris Journal 1937/9 was acclaimed by the critics when we published it in 1978; by a remarkable coincidence an earlier long-lost journal has also come to light for the period immediately preceding the former one. For this new journal the author has written a long introduction describing among much else his involvement with Mass-Observation and an account of his visit to Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Also reprinted for the first time are his only published short story Death of an Explorer, and his essay on the Russian philosopher Léon Chestov.  

An Epistle highlighting the relationship of Gascoyne and Ginsberg. This letter, written by David Gascoyne in 1986 as a contribution to a festschrift for his friend and fellow poet Allen Ginsberg was published in America that year. It was unknown in the UK when Roger Scott edited Gascoyne’s Selected Prose 1934-1996 and for some years afterwards. Published to mark Gascoyne’s centenary in October 2016, it is an important document illuminating what was always a grey area in his biography: the visit Gascoyne made with Kathleen Raine and W. S. Graham to the USA in the autumn of 1951. Following in the footsteps of Dylan...