His Mind Full of Starlings

A woodcut made in 2018/19 was part of over 40 images made to illustrate Adam Nicolson’s The Making of Poetry. Adam’s book, published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in The States celebrated the formative relationship between William Wordsworth and Samual Taylor Coleridge while they stayed in The Quantock  in Somerset in the late 18th Century. It was the time when this coming together of these two great poets conjured up the beginning of a new  poetry that not only addressed the injustices of the time on the poor in Great Britain and the schism of their miserable existence between themselves and the rich of the time, but also kick started the romantic movement with a new understanding that the cerebral relationship between man and his/her natural  surroundings  was key to a new more holistic approach to how human kind is part and parcel of the environment - TH