Guests of Time: Poetry from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
John Holmes (ed.) with photographs by Scott Billings
In 2016 the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, one of the great Victorian museums and a masterpiece of the Gothic Revival, hosted three poets in residence as part of a year celebrating Visions of Nature in different art forms. The poets – John Barnie, Steven Matthews and Kelley Swain – responded to all aspects of the museum, including its history, its architecture and its collections. This anthology gathers together their poetry along with poems by Victorian poets who were involved in the decoration of the museum and who studied at Oxford during its early days. Beautifully illustrated with photographs of the museum and its specimens by Scott Billings, and including an introduction by John Holmes to the museum’s origins in one of the most fruitful collaborations of scientists, artists and poets, the book is a work of art in its own right and a fitting celebration of the museum’s history of fostering the arts as well as the sciences.
Contributors: John Barnie, Scott Billings, Walter Deverell, John Holmes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, May Kendall, Steven Matthews, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Kelley Swain, John Addington Symonds Sr., John Addington Symonds Jr., John Lucas Tupper and Thomas Woolner
Order online at: www.valleypressuk.com.