PositiveThe GuardianNicolson...pays minute attention to physical textures and seasonal changes, weaving into his lyrical and rhapsodic descriptions of the natural world passages of biographical and critical analysis. There is also plentiful testimony from their contemporaries as to the suspiciously radical character of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle ... one of the most striking features of this book: its numerous illustrations by the artist Tom Hammick. Many of these woodcuts were created using fallen timber from the park at Alfoxden where the Wordsworth siblings lived. Populated by blobby, generally faceless figures, Hammick’s brightly colored landscapes stand in an uncertain relationship to the text that surrounds them, and indeed to Wordsworth and Coleridge. They look rather like album covers from the 1970s or 80s. In a book that partly celebrates inaptness and mismatching, perhaps such incongruity is fitting.
