Edward Thomas wrote a lifetime's poetry in two years. Already a dedicated prose writer and influential critic, he became a poet only in December 1914, at the age of 36. In April 1917 he was killed at Arras. Often viewed as a 'war poet', he wrote nothing directly about the trenches; also seen as a 'nature poet', his symbolic reach and generic range expose the limits of that category too. A central figure in modern poetry, he is among the half-dozen poets who remade English poetry in the early 20th century. Edna Longley published an acclaimed edition of Edward Thomas' "Poems" and "Last Poems" in 1973. Her work advanced Thomas' reputation as a major modern poet. Now she has produced a revised version, which includes all his poems and draws on freshly available archive material. The extensive notes contain substantial quotations from Thomas' prose, letters and notebooks, as well as a new commentary on the poems. The prose hinterland behind Edward Thomas' poems helps us to understand their depth and complexity, together with their contexts in his troubled personal life, in wartime England, and in English poetry. Edna Longley also shows how Thomas' criticism feeds into his poetry, and how he prefigured critical approaches, such as 'ecocriticism', that are now applied to his poems. The text of this edition, which has a detailed textual apparatus, differs in small but significant ways from that of other extant collections of Thomas' poems. The Bloodaxe edition is larger (with more comprehensive notes) than Faber's "Collected Poems" by Edward Thomas as well as a pound cheaper. More importantly, for academic sales, the Bloodaxe text is more authoritative than Faber's (which uses R. George Thomas' 1978 text). Edna Longley has used manuscripts, proofs and newly available archive material to establish a text for Edward Thomas' complete poetry which will now be used by scholars and students in all future discussions of his work.

Though sometimes classified with Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon as a 'war poet', he was rather a poet who died tragically in the war, and whose main subjects were the English countryside and its people, and the solitude of the observing self. The present edition offers the complete poems together with detailed editorial apparatus in what has become acknowledged as the standard edition by R. George Thomas. It also includes Thomas's remarkable prose War Diary of 1917.

Edward Thomas' stories formed an important stage in his imaginative development, and constitute a significant achievement. His fiction includes stories reflecting his personal quest for spiritual and social values, which have considerable psychological interest; and versions of traditional Celtic and Norse tales and English proverbs. In both original and traditional tales Thomas explores the relation between the human world and the realm of nature. His stories were, as he said, written under a 'real impulse', and they represent his whole effort to shape imaginative responses to fundamental questions of life and death, the self, and reality. "The Ship of Swallows" is the first selection to have been made exclusively from Edward Thomas' fiction, which it represents at its best.

Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, London, in 1878, and educated at St Paul's College and Lincoln College, Oxford. Thomas voluntarily enlisted in the Artists' Rifles in 1915 and was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1916. He was killed in action at Arras on 9 April 1917. Since his death his reputation as a poet has grown steadily, but the prose work is largely inaccessible or unknown. His books have often been dismissed as bread-and-butter work by a poet who was able to blossom only when his soldier's pay released him from wage-earning. Roland Gant has made a selection from Thomas's writings on country matters which will be welcomed not only by admirers of his poetry but also by readers interested in pre-1914 rural life. Drawing on nearly twenty books such as The South Country, Wales, The Heart of England and volumes of essays, Grant has arranged his extracts under the headings 'Roads and Footpaths', 'The Lie of the Land', 'Figures in the Landscape' and 'Through the Year'. Interspersed are poems that often distil the theme of a prose description and show that Thomas's strength as a poet is more than equal to his creative achievement as a writer of prose.

For Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies (1848-87) was more than a nature writer: he was a guiding spirit of the English landscape who affected a profound influence upon Thomas's own writings. From his boyhood days, Thomas regarded Jefferies' The Amateur Poacher (1879) among his favourite books for its eerie capture of 'the free air-open', and as Thomas himself grew into an adept chronicler of the English countryside he would return to his mentor with this astute critical biography. First published in 1909, Richard Jefferies is a subtle account of the nineteenth-century writer's life and an illuminating study of a body of work which Thomas once described as 'a gospel, an incantation'.

This remarkable anthology is meant, in the words of its editor, for all those 'who like a book that can always lighten some of their burdens or give wings to their delight, whether in the open air by day, or under the roof at evening; for I have gathered into it much of the finest English poetry'. Already established as the leading young critic of contemporary verse, Edward Thomas used this volume to further a longstanding aim - to present English literature to a new audience.

First published in 1907, the collection draws among others on Thomas's contemporaries Yeats, de la Mare, T. Sturge Moore, Masefield, Noyes, Davies and Housman. The volume remained in print until 1950 in Jonathan Cape's "Travellers' Library" series, and, in the words of his biographer R. George Thomas, 'remains an expression of one side of Thomas - boon companion and ready singer of songs among friends - that has often been overlooked'.

'Mr Edward Thomas, that curious and enthusiastic explorer of the English countryside, ' ran the original advertisement for Dent's 1906 series of books under The Heart of England banner. Thomas's own book of that title, published before he was to become known as a poet, already reveals the poet's sensitivity for language and the poet's eye for truth.

Thomas was always aware of the richness of the English countryside, the elusive beauty of the natural world. Everything he saw was something to be treasured. Here is the essence of the England he knew, in all seasons and in all moods: an august day through the haze of corn dust 'when the thresher twists his oaken flail, ' or a November morning in the 'Close, perpendicular, quiet rain'.

To read the essays collected here is to feel what it would have been like to walk with Thomas - in spring when 'The larks sing invisible in the white May sky' or in autumn 'when the moon is clear, and the tingling sea is vast and alone'.

Killed at Arras in 1917, Edward Thomas left behind him a short, vivid history of his own early life, covering the period from his birth to his entry into St Paul's. Though a fragment, in many senses it is far more: in the words of its author 'no less than an autobiography . . . an attempt to put down on paper what [this author] sees when he thinks of himself from 1878 to about 1895'. The Childhood of Edward Thomas was not published until 1938, over two decades after Thomas originally showed the manuscript to a publisher. Those eventual publishers, Faber & Faber, were building on their release two years earlier of Thomas's Collected Poems, for which he was becoming best known. This edition includes Edward Thomas's 'War Diary,' a record of the last three months of his life when, as an elderly - at thirty-eight - subaltern he fought among the misery of the trenches. To witness Thomas's childhood memoir and wartime diaries in such close proximity is to have a moving incarnation of his distinctive voice, its clarity and - even in war - its unfailing attention to his fellow-creatures.

In mid to late March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War which was to claim his life gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills. The poet recorded his journey through his beloved South Country and his account was published as In Pursuit of Spring in 1914. Regarded as one of his most important prose works, it stands as an elegy for a world now lost. What is less well-known is that Thomas took with him a camera, and photographed much of what he saw, noting the locations on the back of the prints. These have been kept in archives for many years and will now be published for the very first time in the book. Thomas journeys through Guildford, Winchester, Salisbury, across the Plain, to the Bristol Channel, recording the poet's thoughts and feelings as winter ends.

"No city preserves the memory and signature of so many men. The past and the dead have here as it were, a corporate life..." Edward Thomas is now best known for the poetry he wrote between 1914 and his untimely death at Arras in 1917. But during his lifetime his reputation was based on the extraordinary body of travel writing, reviews, and critical books he produced against intense deadline pressures in order to feed his growing family. His travel books, most notably Oxford and The South Country have had an enduring appeal for all lovers the English countryside. Through these and his later poems, Thomas has come to be regarded as the quintessential English writer. And yet he was Welsh, observing and loving England as a semi-outsider. Oxford, published three years after he completed his degree, was Thomas's first major commission. In it, he gives an evocative account of Oxford's architecture, history, and customs, drawing on personal memories of undergraduate life at Lincoln College. His prose was written to accompany the paintings of Fulleylove, who shared his interest in juxtaposing Oxford's grandeur with the ordinary details of domestic life. Between them, the artist and the writer catch the beauty of this "city within the heart" at a pivotal moment in pre-war history, and give it to us as though it could last forever in that form. In a Critical Introduction, Lucy Newlyn examines the importance of Oxford as a historical record. But she also argues that it is a piece of vivid experimental prose, in which much of Thomas's later greatness is anticipated. Her analysis of his prose style shows how Thomas tries out the voices of the past, defining his own particular brand of Modernism by creating a kind of "bricolage" through allusion and imitation. Running steadily beneath the text's elaborate ventriloquism is the quiet ruminative voice of the authentic Thomas, edging ever closer to the simple speech rhythms of his lyric poems. This is the first critical edition of Oxford, giving long overdue credit to the book as an early masterpiece in the Thomas oeuvre.

When Edward Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 his poems were largely unpublished. But in the years since his death, his work has come to be cherished for its rare, sustained vision of the natural world and as 'a mirror of England' (Walter de la Mare). This edition, drawn from Thomas's manuscripts and typescripts as well as from his published works, offers an accessible introduction to this most resonant - and relevant - of poets. 'In his lifetime, he was known and loved by a very, loving few. Now, since his death, he is known and loved by very many, and yearly this is more so. There is in his poems an unassumingly profound sense of permanence. A war came and ditched him, but his poems stay with no other wounds than those which caused them.' Dylan Thomas 'A very fine poet. And a poet all in his own right. The accent is absolutely his own.' Robert Frost 'The one hundred and forty poems he wrote in the last two years of his life are a miracle. I can think of no body of work in English that is more mysterious.' Michael Longley

It's all go at the animal hospital! See how we care for animals from the big to the small. Encourage your child's interests as they explore the many layers of life in the animal hospital. This book is the perfect accompaniment to real-life imaginative role-play.

Since his tragic death in the First World War, Edward Thomas has emerged as a major poet of the English tradition. This selection, made by a poet who shares Edward Thomas's deep but unsentimental feeling for and response to nature, reinforces Thomas's claim to centrality.

Edward Thomas's death in the Second World War robbed the world of a great poet, a fine writer, and a pioneering environmentalist. Published in 1909, The South Country is the happiest of all his books. Lyrical, passionate, acutely sensitive to life in the countryside and the rhythms of the seasons, it brilliantly merges landscape, folk culture and natural history into a record of what Edward Thomas saw and felt as he wandered the old ways of southern England.

Edward Thomas is one of the best-loved of English poets, and a model of integrity for many of his successors. His poetry was written during the space of just two years, before he was killed in the First World War. Those years lie at the heart of "Edward Thomas' Poets": Judy Kendall's gathering of poems and letters embeds that brief period of intense poetic creativity within the wider narrative of Thomas' life. For the first time, letters by Thomas about writing and publishing are set alongside his poems, revealing the occasions of their composition, illuminating the processes of recollection, revision and development that transformed him into a poet. Interleaved with Thomas' own poems and letters are works by the literary friends whom he criticised and admired, and whose influence he absorbed: Walter de la Mare, W.H. Hudson, Robert Frost, Eleanor Farjeon and others. Many of the letters included here have not been collected before or are out of print.Enhanced by Judy Kendall's detailed notes and bibliographies, "Edward Thomas' Poets" provides a new perspective on Thomas' reading and writing of poetry, illuminating specific poems and revealing the complex sources of his mature verse.

The alarm bell is ringing! It's time to slide down the pole and jump into action!

Encourage your child's interests as they explore the many layers of life in the fire station. This book is the perfect accompaniment to real-life imaginative role-play.