Oak Knoll

Limited to 120 copies. A fine copy.

The third in the Loose Canons series, with each issue devoted to reasserting the rights of a poet whose work is fashionably passed over or otherwise overlooked to be read and enjoyed. Designed by Crispin Elsted using the text from the Oxford edition of Edward Thomas's Collected Poems. Hand-set in Joanna typeface by Lea Sánchez Milde with Tiern Titling for display, and printed on Zerkall Cream Laid paper.

From the printer's website: "Edward Thomas may be the most English of all poets, as English as Frost is American: it is not surprising that Thomas and Frost became very close friends during Frosts time spent in England from 1912 to 1915. Both men seek and capture the essence of the overlooked. It was Frost who encouraged Thomas to write poetry, after Thomas had spent a lifetime as a writer of travel books, biography, criticism, and reflections on the English countryside, which he loved. Astonishingly, he only began to write poetry in 1914, and all his poems were written in the last three years of his life. He was killed while in active service in Flanders.

His poems have a unique tone and rhythm, connected in many cases with the varieties of English spoken in the countryside in which he spent his life, and the forms in which he casts his poems tend to the condition of the ballad or the English lyric. A few of his poems simply revel in the luxuriance of country place-names, or flowers, or birds, anticipating Audens later suggestion that lyric poetry begins with lists: for example the list of ships in the Iliad, Perditas catalogue of flowers in The Winters Tale, and Miltons similar list in Lycidas. But Thomas is a true countryman, and his poems do not romanticize their subjects; indeed they are often chillingly exact in their descriptions..."