Thomas HardyPlaces and Other Poems
 
Thomas Hardy is renowned for his creation of the fictionalised region of Wessex, and the importance of places for him is clear from this carefully chosen selection of his poems. Each relates to a specific location and explores the way in which, for Hardy, its significance is determined by the various kinds of personal impressions and stories it has witnessed, whether his own or musings on others glimpsed in passing. Sally Castle's wonderfully evocative and sensitive illustrations in their own way provide a third dimension: the artist s response to both place and poem. Hardy's imagination appears most intensely engaged, as Peter Robinson's afterword explores, by interrelations of personal experience and the circumstances in which it happens to befall.