A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens

In celebration of the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, Two Rivers Press with the English Association present an anthology of new poems by contemporary writers responding to the life and work of this most enduringly popular of novelists. Prompted by incidents from his life, the characters and plots of his novels, or their afterlife in other arts and cultural memory, these poems offer a series of intimate glimpses into Dickens’s place in the current poetic imagination. Edited by award-winning poet and translator Peter Robinson, with an introduction by Adrian Poole, the anthology includes contributions from more than fifty poets, among them Moniza Alvi, Robyn Bolam, Alison Brackenbury, Fred D’Aguiar, Gerald Dawe, Maura Dooley, Ian Duhig, Elaine Feinstein, John Fuller, Philip Gross, John Hegley, Angela Leighton, Jamie McKendrick, Paul Muldoon, Sean O’Brien, Deryn Rees-Jones, Peter Riley, Carol Rumens, Elizabeth Smither, C. K. Stead, George Szirtes and Jeffrey Wainwright. Beautifully designed in the best tradition of Two Rivers Press, the cover shows an image of the Mechanics’ Institute, Reading, now the Great Expectations Hotel & Bar, where Dickens himself visited and read.