When he speaks of ''reading for this anthology,'' we must remind ourselves that his preparation has been the work of a lifetime only the richly stored mind of a humane and voracious reader could have marshaled and brought to attention so many and such varied responses.
Enright remarks, ''I was moved to the thought that on no theme have writers shown themselves more lively.'' He is surely right, but the liveliness is there also and initially in the editorial prose that introduces each of the book's 14 sections. This epigraph glosses the book as a whole. One of the epigraphs to ''The Oxford Book of Death'' is from a survivor of Belsen who finds it apt to say, ''When in death we are in the midst of life,'' rather than the opposite. Enright, a novelist and memoirist, fine poet (his ''Collected Poems'' appeared two years ago), prolific reviewer and author of one of the most useful books on Shakespeare within recent memory (''Shakespeare and the Students,'' 1970).
Acknowledgment of the editor's role in this operation should be the beginning and end of any review, especially since it is hard to think of anyone more qualified for the job than Mr. Enright's compilation of responses to death and its relatives (suicide, mourning, graveyards, funerals, hereafters, revenants, etc.) is on just about every page very much a book of life: lively, wise, deeply humorous. A good quip, though easy to come back at, since D.J. ''BUT where is 'The Oxford Book of Life'?'' a friend quipped when informed of the latest title in Oxford's ''books of'' list. He published "The Laughing Hyena," the first of 20 books of poetry, in 1953.THE OXFORD BOOK OF DEATH Edited by D.J. He wrote four more adult novels and three for children.Įnright met his wife, French artist Madeleine Harders, in Egypt and they were married in 1949. He was a lecturer in English there until 1950, and in 1955 published his first novel, "Academic Year," set at the university. He got his masters degree at Cambridge University before taking up a teaching post at Alexandria University in Egypt in 1947. Morrison said that affection was for the artist and the man: "gentle-mannered but uncompromising, tough-minded but humane, above all funny _ a person for whom the adjective 'sardonic' was invented."ĭennis Joseph Enright was born March 11, 1920, in Leamington Spa, central England. Poet Blake Morrison, in an obituary written for The Guardian, called Enright the unsung hero of postwar British poetry and said, "it is hard to think of a poet whom other poets held in more affection." "If anybody of his time was descended from that extinct species, the English man of letters, then it was he," The Daily Telegraph said in its obituary. Although not the most famous of Britain's modern poets, he was greatly admired by critics, academics and his fellow poets.
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