Tom Pohrt

Tom Pohrt spent years gathering those poems of Wendell Berry's he imagined children might read and appreciate, making sketches to accompany his selection. Over the past several years a dialogue has evolved in which the poet has come to advise the illustrator on the natural history of the animals and plants seen so intimately in the poems. Then came the august book designer Dave Bullen, who has been designing the books of Wendell Berry for more than thirty years. The resulting volume of 21 poems includes dozens of the sketches, drawings and watercolors in what amounts to a visual meditation on the poem they work to illustrate and is simply staggering in both its beauty and its meaning to those of us who remain lovers of the book as physical object. In the full-color Terrapin we have not only a volume of staggering beauty but a consummate example of the collaborative effort that is fine bookmaking, the perfect gift for children, grandchildren or anyone who remains a lover of the book as physical object.

Born in 1793, John Clare lived and worked during the Golden Age of British poetry, the time of Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Coleridge. In the grand tradition of English nature writing, he stands alongside Wordsworth as a poet of extraordinary humanity and great spirit. Clare was 18 years old when the first Luddite riots occurred. He was deeply resistant to the first years of England's Enclosure, and he offers a contemporaneous look at what the world was like for those struggling with the impact of the first Industrial Revolution. Uneducated but remarkably well read, Clare was briefly celebrated in London, only to spend his final years in a lunatic asylum. He died in one on May 20, 1864, almost exactly one year before William Butler Yeats was born and the world set out on the path to Modernism. As James Reeves, an early critic and admirer, has said,  The existence of Clare the poet is, of course, a miracle . . . This is its most precious gift. Clare was a happy poet; there is more happiness in his poetry than in that of most others. This was no mere animal contentment of body and senses, but a quiet ecstasy and inward rapture. Such happiness is not to be had except at a price." Tom Pohrt's drawings and watercolors have been widely admired. There are few alive whose sensibility more properly matches Clare's it's as if Samuel Palmer had taken the commission to illustrate a selection of the peasant poet. Pohrt has himself made the selection of poems from the vast quantity that survived Clare's chaotic life. Robert Hass joins the project to place Clare's work in the larger context of nature poetry in the West. The result is a book sure to please those who know already of Clare's fine poems and those for whom this book will be their exciting introduction.