Oak Knoll

Limited to 120 copies. A fine copy.

Printed in Poliphilus & Blado with Caslon Antique for display, hand-set by Apollonia Elsted and printed on Zerkall Cream laid paper by her and Lea Sánchez Milde, it is sewn into wraps of St-Armand Canal paper.

From the printer's website: "E A Robinsons work has a documentary alertness about it, especially in his portraits of characters in Tilbury, a town he created to house the folk who inhabit many of his poems and exemplify his convictions about humanity. His poems were widely read and greatly praised during his life, and for some time after: he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry three times. Yet particularly after the Second World War his reputation shifted largely into the academies, and he became a figure of the past to most readers - especially to the new generation of poetry readers from the 1950s and 60s who espoused the boisterous, gangling styles of Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beats, the casual familiarities of Frank OHara or the self-consciousness of Black Mountain and the New York School. For all the unquestionably fine qualities of this New American Poetry (as Donald Allen titled his seminal anthology introducing these poets to the public) Robinsons work was too civil, thoughtful, and wise to survive in such company. His calm, considered voice would have been shouted down, and his observations passed off as inconsequential.

The title poem of Loose Canons Two, Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, is one of Robinsons several dramatic monologues, a form or device he inherited from an occasional tradition particularly evident in 19th century English poetry, and notably a feature of Robert Brownings work. This poem, written in fluid, colloquially adroit blank verse, is spoken by the playwright Ben Jonson, historically a close friend of Shakespeare who nevertheless found fault with certain elements of his writing and - at least in the context of Robinsons poem - of his character. The unidentified and fictional man from Stratford visiting Jonson in London is clearly someone who also knows Will Shakespeare personally, and Jonsons discussion of their mutual friend is illuminating and persuasive in itself; we are not, however, made aware of his guests responses."