Cobbing is one of the greatest British poets of the twentieth century and without his work, concrete and avant garde poetry as it is today would not be wholly possible. I have always been indelibly drawn to the humour in his poetry, how it accompanies his verbal sophistication and irrepressible energy. He achieves what so much smarmy mainstream poetry cannot – a true sense of Britishness, the banality, the irony, the fugue of England.