Patricia Beer

Patricia Beer (4 November 1919 – 15 August 1999) was an English poet and critic.

She was born in Exmouth, Devon into a family of Plymouth Brethren. She moved away from her religious background as a young adult, becoming a teacher and academic. She began to write poetry after World War II, while living in Italy; she is most often classified as a 'New Romantic' poet comparable to John Heath-Stubbs. On her own account, however, there is a discontinuity in her work. Devon is a major presence.

She was married twice; first to the writer P.N. Furbank, and then to Damien Parsons, an architect, settling in Upottery, near Honiton, England. From the later 1960s she wrote full time. She edited several significant anthologies, broadcast, and contributed to literary reviews.

Publications

 * Loss of the Magyar, and other poems (1959)
 * The Survivors (1963) poems
 * Just Like the Resurrection (1967) poems
 * Mrs. Beer's House (1968) autobiography
 * The Estuary (1971) poems
 * An Introduction to the Metaphysical Poets (1972)
 * Reader: I Married Him (1974) criticism
 * Driving West (1975)
 * Moon's Ottery (1978)
 * Selected Poems (1979)
 * The Lie of the Land (1983)
 * Collected Poems (1988) poems
 * Friends of Heraclitus (1993)
 * Autumn (1997) poems
 * Abbey Tomb (date unknown)