The Writers of Wales Database

DALE, PETER

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For twenty-four years, Peter Dale edited the literary journal Agenda with William Cookson. Full-time poet and translator, he is now an editorial director of Between the Lines Press that specializes in book-length interviews and bibliographies of poets.

Well-known for the sonnet sequence One Another, he has been widely praised for translations of Villon, Laforgue, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, all published by Anvil Press which brought out Wry-Blue Loves, his Corbière translation, in 2005, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Translation. The third edition of One Another, appeared in 2002 in hardback from Waywiser Press. Under the Breath, his latest book of verse, was published by Anvil in the same year. Published with BTL, are Richard Wilbur in Conversation with Peter Dale, and Michael Hamburger in Conversation with Peter Dale and, published in 2005, Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven. His translation of Valéry’s Charms and Other Pieces was published by Anvil in 2007 and is now reprinting. In spring 2008 he moved to Cardiff. A new sequence of verse, Local Habitation (Anvil Poetry Press) was published in May 2009. Peter is a Member of Academi.

For more information, please visit the Waywiser Press and Anvil Press websites by clicking on the links. Peter also has a presence on the National Poetry Archive website.

The photograph of Peter is copyrighted to Caroline Forbes. It has been used with permission and is not to be commercially reproduced.

Reviews:

"…But here is one who has achieved the transmutation of metals. He requires and rewards attention. His words are memorable…"
Peter Levi

"..Edge to Edge can be absorbing, and it is a monument to this poet’s unfashionable kind of integrity…"
Alan Brownjohn

"…Peter Dale has, while remaining faithful to the originals, produced wonderfully inventive, skilful and, above all, entertaining versions of Villon’s masterpieces, The Legacy and The Testament, as well as the handful of other poems…" 
Vernon Scannell

"…Peter Dale is the most underrated poet of his generation, and his sonnet sequence One Another, his ‘morphology of an emotion’, one of the most undervalued volumes of the 1970s…"
Michael Donaghy

"… beautifully made lyrics from a master translator and poet …"
Harry Gilonis

"…Dale’s work needs no recommendation. It is there as a body of writing at the centre of the art…"
Stephen Wade

"...The sheer assurance of the crafting of Too Much of Water is striking. Dale’s lines have a fluency and, often, intricacy of cadence that few of his contemporaries can match..."
John Loveday

"...The first three poems in this collection [Under the Breath] ‘Answer’, ‘Visitation’ and ‘Nocturne’ are breathtaking. The unguarded intensity of feeling is transformed by a precision of voice expressing this feeling that has created three truly great elegies..."  
Judy Gahagan

"...This is the best complete rhymed Dante [The Divine Comedy] we are likely to have for a very long time..."             
David Wheatley


With respect to Edge to Edge: Selected Poems (Anvil Press Poetry, 1996):

"...Peter Dale has been neglected in reputation … He is the long-distance runner of his generation and it is exciting to follow his development. His lines ring true because that is precisely what they are..."
Grey Gowrie

"...’Mirrors, Windows’ [in Edge to Edge] does seem an extraordinarily controlled poem, an elegiac, beautiful and in the best sense consoling reflection on the difficulties of human relations, of love and families, of memory and endurance..."
William Bedford


With respect to One Another (Waywiser Press, 2002):

"...The best contemporary users of the sonnet – such as Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, Peter Dale and Francis Warner – have shown that the potential of the form … is far from exhausted..."
Glyn Pursglove

"...a love-poet of the greatest tenderness, whether in the magnificent sonnets of One Another, or in the lyrics that continue the great English tradition..."
Glyn Pursglove

"...The best of these poems are engaging, immediate and direct – to the point where the writer disappears and the reader is confronted intimately with the subject – as though thought and feeling, and observation, derive exclusively from within the reader’s mind, perception and reaction seamlessly one..."
David Storey

"...It is poetry of a very high order, quite worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as that published in its decade by Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill and F. T. Prince … I can’t point out the bright essence of the book – it’s everywhere, but nowhere on the page specifically..."
W G. Shepherd


With respect to Local Habitation (Anvil Poetry Press, 2009)

"...I think it is Peter' Dale's finest collection, and the simplest thing for a reviewer to do is let the poet, most beautifully in the imagery and hesitations of the final poem addressed to Jo, 'Twitch' ..."
William Bedford,Acumen

"...Good examples of the way Dale catches these subtle emotional overlaps in poems that show formidable formal control are the three villanelles that punctuate the collection..."
Andrew McCulloch, TLS


Selected Publications:
Verse
Edge to Edge: Selected Poems (Anvil Press Poetry, 1996)
One Another - Sonnet Sequence (Waywiser Press, 2002)
Under the Breath (Anvil Press Poetry, 2002)
Eight by Five; Epigrams (Rack Press, 2007)
Local Habitation (Anvil Poetry Press, 2009)

Contributed to:
Prose
Michael Hamburger in conversation with Peter Dale (BTL, 1998)         
Anthony Thwaite in conversation with Ian Hamilton and Peter Dale (BTL, 1999)
Richard Wilbur in conversation with Peter Dale (BTL, 2000)
Peter Dale in conversation with Cynthia Haven (BTL, 2005)

Translations
Poems of Jules Laforgue - bilingual text (translator) (Anvil Press Poetry, 2001)
Poems of François Villon - bilingual text (translator) (Anvil Press Poetry, 2001)
Wry-Blue Loves /Les Amours Jaunes by Tristan Corbière - bilingual text (translator) (Anvil Press Poetry, 2005)
The Divine Comedy (terza rima version) (translator) (Anvil Press Poetry, 2007)
Charms and Other Pieces by Paul Valéry - bilingual text (translator) (Anvil Press Poetry, 2007) 




Local Habitation (Anvil Poetry Press, 2009)

Local Habitation is Peter Dale’s first original work since Under the Breath (Anvil Press, 2002). It is a sequence in three voices, in which a man and two women (their identities distinguished typographically) explore their memories in a series of conversational lyric poems. The sequence starts with the man’s first love, which ends suddenly. There is an encounter and marriage with another, the joy of birth, the mourning for the infant’s death and its aftermath. The voices of the protagonists, rooted in their local habitations, weave in and out of the speech and consciousness of each of them with all the tones, nuances, poignancies, pleasures and regrets of hindsight with its shifts in recollection, the voluntary and involuntary self-editing of memory and mis-memory. There is a ghostly eternal triangle whose angles are ruled feint or bold in response to situation, time and change. The work is entertaining both as lyric and as narrative and is a novel contribution to poetry.

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