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Lilian Bowes Lyon
Snow Bees
A Selection of Poems
edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod
Publishing 24 July 2026, pre-order/subscribe now
—
Edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod, this new selection brings the full range of Lilian Bowes Lyons’s poetry back into print for the first time since 1948.
Lilian Bowes Lyon (1895-1949) was a unique poetic voice amid the political turmoil of the 1930s and 40s. Born in Northumberland, whose chilly, glittering landscape inspired her throughout her life, she lived in the East End during the war and wrote about her experience of the Blitz.
Her poems, with their richly patterned cadences and deep sympathy for both the human and natural world, were closer in spirit to the raptures of Gerard Manley Hopkins than the urbanity of the Auden group. Her voice, however, was her own - lyrical, tender, ecstatic, tough - and praised by contemporaries like Edith Sitwell and Walter de la Mare.
Lilian Bowes Lyon's Collected Poems (1948) has long been out of print. Snow Bees makes this moving and memorable poet available to readers again.
Jeremy Noel-Tod teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, the Complete Poems of R.F. Langley and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem.
—
Like snow bees in the night,
Softly they arrive;
Our eyes are hurt
By the surprise of love
—
Publication date: 24 July 2026
32pp, staple-bound in card covers
Printed on Munken Pure paper in East London by Angel Press
ISBN: 978-1-9195507-2-5
Lilian Bowes Lyon
Snow Bees
A Selection of Poems
edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod
Publishing 24 July 2026, pre-order/subscribe now
—
Edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod, this new selection brings the full range of Lilian Bowes Lyons’s poetry back into print for the first time since 1948.
Lilian Bowes Lyon (1895-1949) was a unique poetic voice amid the political turmoil of the 1930s and 40s. Born in Northumberland, whose chilly, glittering landscape inspired her throughout her life, she lived in the East End during the war and wrote about her experience of the Blitz.
Her poems, with their richly patterned cadences and deep sympathy for both the human and natural world, were closer in spirit to the raptures of Gerard Manley Hopkins than the urbanity of the Auden group. Her voice, however, was her own - lyrical, tender, ecstatic, tough - and praised by contemporaries like Edith Sitwell and Walter de la Mare.
Lilian Bowes Lyon's Collected Poems (1948) has long been out of print. Snow Bees makes this moving and memorable poet available to readers again.
Jeremy Noel-Tod teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, the Complete Poems of R.F. Langley and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem.
—
Like snow bees in the night,
Softly they arrive;
Our eyes are hurt
By the surprise of love
—
Publication date: 24 July 2026
32pp, staple-bound in card covers
Printed on Munken Pure paper in East London by Angel Press
ISBN: 978-1-9195507-2-5