Staying West

Staying West: The Writing Life of Anthony C. West Paperback – September 1, 2019   When Anthony C. West’s first collection, River’s End and Other Stories, appeared, the reviewer in the Oxford Mail (August 11, 1960) described reading it as “quite an experience. Like a kick in the guts from a jack-booted leprechaun.” The image is apt. West powerfully united violence, decay, and corruption with natural, fanciful, poetic, and spiritual beauty. The combination is the complex, contradictory texture of life itself, of course, and West had a genius for making the reader see and feel it. Through the senses, he reached for the head and the heart. Like his literary countrymen Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, and Sean O’Casey, West offered a complete world view. Parts of that view were esoterically Christian; all of it was socially munificent, and most of it was ahead of its time in being ecologically responsible.  Receiving highest praise, his work was in print for fifty consecutive years: The Native M