Tony Connor left school at fourteen and worked as a textile designer in Manchester for many years. He finds his poems among the affections and troubles of everyday experience rather than in the esoteric or the literary. Yet he possesses a subtle sense of his own making: he is well aware that poems are formed by the mind pondering what was or what might be. From this interplay of experience and imagination he makes poems that are remarkable for their precision, their wry humour, their dramatic flair and their easy grasp of large issues.

New and Selected Poems contains poems from four of his five previously published collections, together with a large group of new poems written in the United States. Since 1971 Tony Connor has lived in Middletown, Connecticut; he is a professor of English at Wesleyan University.