Decades of Poems by Patrick O'Brian Discovered

A stash of poems by British author Patrick O'Brian has been recovered from a drawer, "with the majority unknown even to his own family," as Sian Cain writes for The Guardian. The poems, which number over a hundred, are to be published next year by HarperCollins. More:

O’Brian’s stepson, Count Nikolai Tolstoy, said that he had inherited about 20 poems by O’Brian after the author’s death in 2000, and knew there had been others from the author’s diaries and those of his mother, O’Brian’s second wife, Mary Tolstoy O’Brian. However, he had not seen most of the poems until HarperCollins approached him this year.

“Not many people realise Patrick was keen to be a poet,” said Tolstoy. “He’d be very pleased they’re being published, because he was keen to be seen as a poet as well as an author. He wanted to be a poet from a very young age. He was a meticulous writer, one who enjoyed writing short stories, and I think encapsulating his thoughts in a small compass appealed to him. In her diaries, my mother mentions reading the poems and liking them very much, which encouraged him. But there was no attempt, to the best of my knowledge, to collect them.”

Tolstoy said that how the poems had been collected was “rather a mystery” to him. “It covers several decades,” he said. “If he’d been handing it over bit by bit to his publishers, there would be some record of it, but there isn’t. And I don’t think he would have kept them all in one place – he used to lose things all the time. It is rather mysterious.”

Starting from the early 1940s, when O’Brian worked as an ambulance driver during the blitz, and ending in the late 1970s, by which time O’Brian was a bestselling author, the poems cover an enormous range of topics...

Read the full report at The Guardian.