Two tomes simply not enough for the man by whom all critics are judged
WHEN I think of Edward Thomas, killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 and championed by Michael and Edna Longley for the last 30 years, I think of the railway poem Adlestrop, with its haunting birdsong that the poet heard while waiting for the signal to change. And then I think of the so-called Great War, the waste and slaughter. But another poem, If I Were To Own, reprinted here in this latest Selected, will give you a complete flavour of Thomas’s authority:
