Tom Lowenstein’s notebooks & fantasies

From Culbone Wood—In Xanadu

New from Shearsman

The late Roger Langley wrote of this book ‘A major work of the imagination. In no previous genre. Creates its own genre.’ Tom Lowenstein’s new publication is a riveting account of the world of Porlock and the world of Coleridge, ‘the discord between Somersetshire now and the timelessness of Xanadu’s appearance before me.’ This is a book to have on the shelf next to John Livingstone Lowes’s 1927 publication The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination.

Tom Lowenstein refers to the travel writings that so influenced Coleridge, Purchas His Pilgrimage, in terms of the early seventeenth-century writer’s fascination with small details: ‘shrunk as the wax in a dried old hive—lie golden cells of honey.’ Some of these cells will be looked into on the coming Tuesday, February 5^th, at 7.30 in the Swedenborg Hall when Tom will be reading. Not to be missed!