Peter Hay began work on this book three years ago, after a party at which he and Pip Hall discussed making an illustrated and hand-lettered version of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Later, somewhat sobered by the prospect of so many stanzas, but typically refusing to abandon ship, he suggested the more manageable Kubla Khan, that most famous of interrupted poems. Pages of doodles, sketches, notes followed through Christmas and the New Year; here, too were visions of landscape that would fit into his own broader Flint Path project. Sadly, the latter has remained fragmentary, another interrupted idea, but the poem is here, brought to life in Pete’s rubberstamp printing and Pip’s lettering, this ‘miracle of rare device’, these ‘sinuous rills’

John Froy

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