On a drive

The journey through the 40 poems in this volume is neither linear, nor constrained by geography

English Romantic poet P B Shelley, in his famous lyric “To a Skylark”, described a poet as “hidden / In the light of thought / Singing hymns unbidden”, thus sparking the myth of poets divorced from their worlds and working in isolation. This myth was historically and practically untrue, because poetry has mostly been a community art, involving collaboration. For instance, epic poetry, composed over centuries by different people, or even Wordsworth and Coleridge — only a generation older than Shelley — who did not identify individual authors of the poems included in their Lyrical Ballads (1798). Yet, the myth