Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © The Estate of the late Patrick O’Brian CBE 2019
Foreword copyright © Nikolai Tolstoy 2019
Cover © Magdalena Russocka / Trevillion 2019
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Patrick O’Brian asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008261344
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008261351
Version: 2019-02-28
Contents
Copyright
Foreword by Nikolai Tolstoy
Part I: Poems
Blitz poetry
‘The sea and the sky are silent’
Mrs Koren
‘The harsh dry polished rattle’
‘You will come to it’
The Olive Harvest
The Inine
tibi donum offero
A present
French verses
Mal du pays
‘A dog bit his master’
Goat
Looking towards the south
Foxes surprised
Epitaph
February
The Deep Gold of a Pomegranate-Tree
The Cypress Tree
Meads no more
The Lagoon
A Lycéen
In Upper Leeson Street
How to lay a mine
The far side of the pass
August, Sun-impaled
Words from the bottom of a river
Croagh Patrick
A T’ang Landscape Remembered
Song
Farewell, my sin I have enjoyed you
A man under his impulsion
David danced before the ark
The falling of the leaves
Dear Mona Fitzpatrick ’32 (or ’3)
The theft
The electric light failing
Youth gone
Giving up smoking
Diego
Spaniards Exiled
The Captain and the Stock
To the hermitage and down, refreshed
Waiting for money in a far country
In Madame Ponsalié’s garden
Walk by the sea to see wonders
The raven
The young listless man
From the Welsh
Snowdon for the sunrise
The wine-dark sea
The bad day
Sterne
The Pleiades on Christmas Eve
The apology
Dead hours of louring justification, a desert of time
Myself a young man read a poem
The uncertain land
Silver-haired charm and urbanity
Winter in Foreign Parts
Obsèques
The dark figures
‘Is true the rat’
The duty of pleasure
Poulp: or, the Medusa a Toy
Grey and white
No smoking: the second day
Pray, Luv, forgive me my sourness
The Mandrake
For Louise’s visitors’ book
‘Clouds over clouds’
‘Walking on the high mountain’
‘Help my understanding, Lady’
‘Down through the vines’
Collioure
‘Long, straight, the steel lines’