After Pusan

'To describe Alan Ross as a polymath does scant justice to the eclecticism of an extraordinary man . . . Ross was a war hero, poet, bon viveur, travel writer, incorrigible gossip, racehorse owner and brilliant magazine editor.' Richard Whitehead, Observer After Pusan, first published in 1995, is the third panel (alongside Blindfold Games and Coastwise Lights, also in Faber Finds) of a triptych of memoirs by Alan Ross. Inspired by Ross's visit in 1986 to the South Korean coastal city of Pusan, like its predecessors it gracefully entwines poetry and prose. 'After Pusan opens with a thirty-page prose memoir of [Ross's] visit, economically and self-effacingly told, deft in its detail and tireless in its curiosity... This memoir is more than merely an adjunct to Ross's other travel writings, though, and more than only a prelude to the poems which fill the rest of these hundred pages. After Pusan breaks a long silence in his life as a poet; and it was that visit to Korea... that suggested to him 'that if poetry was ever going to come again it might do so now.' PN Review