Places and Other Poems

Creator of the lightly fictionalized region of Wessex, where Reading features as Aldbrickham, Thomas Hardy is naturally considered one of England’s most topographically sensitive authors. In this new collection of his poems, each selected for its relation to a specific locale, and finely illustrated by Sally Castle, 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. So ‘After a Romantic Day’, one of the poems gathered here, proposes that, where human passions are involved, a ‘bald steep cutting, rigid, rough, / And moon-lit, was enough / For poetry of place…’