A Kind Husband

Ida Affleck Graves was born in 1902 in India, and first published a book of poems in 1929 with Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press. Later a couple of slim volumes appeared, illustrated by her well-known engraver husband, Blair Hughes Stanton, and together they won a Venice Biennale Prize in 1937. Then in the 'fifties, novels and children's books appeared from Faber. In the intervening years she has continued to produce poems of a distinct character and style, now collected into a new book for Oxford Poets. Men, hospital, vegetables, animals, all come under this poet's altert irreverent, sometimes sad, always entertaining eye. This book is intended for usual readership for new poetry, and also perhaps the elder generation of readers.