Rating: 
Summary: The Least Deceived
Review: 'Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.'
If you were to look for a central theme in Larkin's poetry, these lines might be it. Larkin constantly grapples with the tragedy of everyday existence and the final inevitability of death, not with rebellion, but with a quiet and honest acceptance. I think this is what sets his poetry apart, that he never shies from unpleasant reality or rebels against it with false bluster or bravado. Larkin constantly comes across in his poems as an old or aging man, but one who with his experience can see the world stripped of all false hopes and illusion. This clarity of observation and expression gives his poetry its power.
Rating:
Summary: A do-not-miss book of unforgetable poetry.
Review: An 'elderly reclusive bachelor', a friend of mine who fancies himself a Larkin clone, introduced me to this wonderous book and to the life of this most interesting poet. I am deeply grateful to both my friend and to his hero. "This Be the Verse" is Larkin's most famous poem if only for the directness of its language and the economy of its expression. The poem begins: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to , but they do. " Upon reading this opening my adult daughters cheered wildly - someone had finally understood their plight. As they fancy children I encouraged reading to the closing couplet: "Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself." This stunned them, as it had me in my turn. Imagine the creative despair of Larkin's: "Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf." Ain't it the truth!A second favourite of mine, "If, My Darling" invites the reader to 'jump' inside the poet's head to view the psychic interior of one who sees "the past is past and the future neuter". Take the trip inside Larkin's poetr - short incursions are all I can handle, three poems at a time with ample time to reflect and to recover before entering this volume for the next disquieting. No poet has reached me like Larkin. He knows the grief at the center of the soul and coveys it with grace and with compassion for us all.
Rating:
Summary: Major difference between two editions
Review: As often happens, Amazon's practice of cross-posting reviews and information specific to _one_ edition of a book on all the webpages for _all_ of that book's editions causes confusion. There are in fact significant differences between the 2004 paperback edition of this superb poet's collected work and the earlier edition of 1989/1993 (hardcover/paperback). Each edition has its merits.
The earlier edition was more comprehensive, including many poems unpublished during Larkin's life. Some of those unpublished poems were inferior to Larkin's previously published work; perhaps half of them were not. (Many of the unpublished poems' states of completion are difficult to determine, a fact acknowledged by the editor.) The poems in the earlier edition are sequenced chronologically in two sections, a primary section of poems written after Larkin began publishing, followed by a smaller section of early poems.
The newer edition eliminates many of the less satisfying of the poems unpublished by Larkin. Strikingly, the newer edition also has been rearranged to reflect the orderings Larkin chose for his few collections. (Notes in the back of the older edition listed by title the order of poems in each prior collection.) These changes make the newer volume better for the casual reader of Larkin, but less useful for the student.
Rating:
Summary: Great reading
Review: Collected Poems is one of the greatest collections of poems ever assembled by one of the greatest English-speaking poets in the world, Philip Larkin (1922-1985). This is a book that should be read by all poetry enthusiasts. Collected Poems encompassed Philip Larkin's entire published poetry career as well as some unpublished poems. Larkin's previously published works in this book are The North Ship published in 1945, the pamphlet on XX Poems published in 1953, The Less Deceived published in 1955, The Whitsun Weddings published in 1964, and High Windows published in 1974. While one could almost never find anything wrong with a collection of poems as numerous as in this book, there is one. The poems are no longer in chronological order. That is, the poems in Collected Poems are no longer in the order that Philip Larkin had intended them to be. This does not matter if one reads each poem separately. However, true readers of poetry must take into account the poems that come before and follow each separate poem. The poems were ordered by Larkin for a specific reason and meaning. This meaning Larkin shows to the reader is lost when the poems are not in the same chronological order as when they first appeared.The language Larkin uses in his poetry makes his poems what they are, magnificent. Larkin does not write in a lofty, scholarly voice. He uses every day language that common people use, and more importantly, understand. The poet is often an ordinary person looking at his subjects. This gives the poem a colloquial language. Larkin's use of ordinary language does not mean his poems are simple. They are far from that. The final stanzas wrap up his poems with intense meaning and symbolism. Aubade and High Windows are two poems that have profound meanings yet are written for all to understand. Simple words does not imply simple meanings to Larkin's poems. Almost every single poem in this book leaves the reader thinking.
Everyday situation are the subjects of most of Larkin's poems. Waiting for Breakfast While She Brushes Her Hair is an example of these. Other poems are On Being Twenty-Six, How to Sleep, Continuing to Live, Love Songs in Age, and Talking in Bed to name a few poems that have subjects that deal with everyday life. These poems carry with them lofty meaning with simple language to get the poet's point of view across. From this book one can learn lessons on marriage, money, women, pictures, and overall daily life.
Rating: 
Summary: The order of the poems matter
Review: I give the book four stars because of Larkin's verse. However it is not clear to me that the editor has paid attention to the order of the composition of the poems. This is a matter often neglected. It is important when reading a poem from a book of poems--say High Windows--to know what poems surrounded it. The editor does provide the original order in the back--but the order of composition matters or rather the arrangement of poems that the poet produces matters--if Larkin wanted a certain order it was because he felt that the poems feed off each other in a specific way. Reproducing the poems willy nilly destroys the pattern of the poetry.
Rating:
Summary: These Be The Verses--5 x 5 Stars=Yes, 25 Stars
Review: In five years, nine Larkinites have posted reviews to these pages. One laments the death of poetry's ability to move the masses, laments the lost world in which poetry was a master art, in which Longfellow might hold a theater in thrall with tales of Gitchee Gumee. Why doesn't everyone who reads in the English Language know Philip Larkin? Oh, this Larkin is most assuredly not for every taste--he is ugly, rueful, bitter, timorous, and in these he is wholly and perfectly one with his poetic voice. He is a formalist--a large quantity of rhymed iambic pentameter at a time when most "poetry" is indistinguishable from prose except in the way the lines are arranged--who sounds, miraculously, astonishingly, colloquial (the particular mark of his genius). Many of these poems attain a perfection--Aubade, High Windows, This Be The Verse, others, all relatively well known--that literally staggers the imagination. As with the (classic) jazz to which Larkin was so devoted, in which the players continually found "new" notes to blow, and even created new musical vocabularies when the old ones were exhausted, Larkin finds boundless new resources inside the English language and then bursts poetry's integument asunder when his straightlaced, albeit eccentric, formalism seems to hem him in. Unlike most contemporary poets, Larkin creates lines you remember--indeed, cannot shake--and want to memorize for the delight, and mortification, of self and friends. Larkin does not, by the bye, deal in any manner of obscurantism. What he means is clearly on the page. It may not leave you in the sunniest of dispositions, but it will lift you, powerfully, to another level of poetic appreciation. This is a book for life by the major voice of my time.
Rating:
Summary: Something about Larkin.
Review: Larkin frequently adopts the persona of the very ordinary man in the street to explore his themes. As a consequence, his poetic language is that of the public bar rather than the literary salon; it is derived from Anglo-Saxon, not Latin or Greek. He is not, for example, averse to using expletives such as "crap" or the "f-word" when moved to despair or fury. The adopted, (or is it Larkin himself?) down-to-earth voice has a colloquially dismissive tone to it, his cyclist in "Church Going", for example, refers to the altar being, "up at the holy end", as he wanders about the building, "bored and uninformed", observing the, "brass and stuff." Equally, in "Poetry of departures", he refers to an acquaintance who has abandoned the conventional life as having, "chucked up everything and just cleared off". This is a man with an educational deficit, who thinks, "books are a load of crap" ("A study of reading habits"), while at the same time, and somewhat slyly, making it clear that he is aware of the existence of words such as "pyx" and "rood lofts," even if he doesn't know the precise meaning of them. However, the reader is only temporarily fooled by this apparent simple-mindedness. Larkin's man in the street is quite capable of profound thought, as is made abundantly clear in the final stanzas. The poems move from a flippant start toward an unanticipated gravitas, where weighty matters are analysed and ex cathedra pronouncements uttered. Larkin's longer poems move, in a tightly controlled manner, toward that cerebral ending. In "Church Going" for example, the rather boorish cyclist, after fooling about at the lectern, begins musing on the uses to which churches might be put in the future. He concludes with a stanza, which attempts to define the possible reasons for the continuation of religious sentiment, or something akin to it. The language, for the most part, remains fairly simple, but includes the obscure word "blent" and the phrase, "robed as destinies," These, along with the triple repetition of "serious", have the effect of creating a weighty tone, entirely in keeping with the subject matter. We are drawn into Larkin's poems by the intriguing banality of the initial focus, along with that very ordinary voice. The endings, however, leave us thinking.
Rating:
Summary: the flowers of unhappiness
Review: Larkin hits home again and again in these pages. His best poems combine an emotional conveyance as clear as water with an effortless and unobtrusive perfection of form. Some of them read like direct conversation. He could be witty or morbid, or both at once. Above all his gift was for memorableness, something that can only be accomplished by striking deep and hard. The arrangement of the volume is right: we are first presented with the poems, starting in 1946, that (in Mr. Thwait's judgement) begin to showcase Larkin's unique voice. A small set of earlier poems is at the back, mostly of historical value (though a few are gems). If you like poetry for its capacity to move you, absorb this volume.
Rating:
Summary: the flowers of unhappiness
Review: Larkin hits home again and again in these pages. His best poems combine an emotional conveyance as clear as water with an effortless and unobtrusive perfection of form. Some of them read like direct conversation. He could be witty or morbid, or both at once. Above all his gift was for memorableness, something that can only be accomplished by striking deep and hard. The arrangement of the volume is right: we are first presented with the poems, starting in 1946, that (in Mr. Thwait's judgement) begin to showcase Larkin's unique voice. A small set of earlier poems is at the back, mostly of historical value (though a few are gems). If you like poetry for its capacity to move you, absorb this volume.
Rating:
Summary: The greatest poet of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
Review: Larkin is a great poet whose Collected Poems are the most exciting body of work to come out of post-war England. Despite his famously small output, the number of poems of great renown is very large, "The Whitsun Weddings", "An Arundel Tomb", "Mr Bleaney", "Sunny Prestatyn", "Letter to a friend about girls", "High Windows", "Love Again" among several others. Other poets have bigger names, Auden in the world, Betjeman in England, Heaney even, but their poems are not nearly so intimately known. The usual reason for this is the education syllabus, which ensures the position of, say, Frost or Shakespeare (both of whom are, of course, great) but Larkin is only grudgingly anthologised in school volumes in England even and rarely taught. Why the intimacy then? Because Larkin spoke the truth, or you could say he spoke true. His diction was everyday idiom: we are advised to "Get stewed", he himself is "fouled-up", his friend has a job "To pay for the kiddies' clobber". But never at the expense of the poetry. Baudelaire viewing "Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" in progress in Picassos' studio regretted the inability of the writer to invent his own words compared with Picasso's intrepid laying out of a new painterly vocabulory. Larkin's enormous poetic ability and equally large artistic integrity allowed him to use the everyday speech of his generation absolutely as it should be used. His narratives fitted this situation allowing him to invent that language and for it to be immediately understood by everyone. His concerns are the concerns of every sensible man, girls, booze, jaz, money, the destruction caused by the population boom, the theatre of other people's lives and of history viewed from a safe distance - that is the spectacle of life without the cost of privacy. These are all intimate concerns to everybody. But he says it beautifully and well and concisely and memorably and everything he says rings with truth and reason. He has that portion of sensibility that everyone can respect. We can all be thankful for Larkin's memorable diagnosis of the 20th century human condition.
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