Travel
Ten Poems from Cumbria
Selected and Introduced by Jacob Polley
Various Authors
£6.95
Cumbria is a place of fellside and farmland, of lakes, saltmarsh and rugged coastlines. To the north lies the vast Solway Plain which looks across to Scotland.
The poems in this selection conduct us on a journey of lively contrasts. We encounter weather, sheep, history, rivers, towns, traffic and dialect, and experience the vividness of living in a place of “wide-lidded skies”. On a summer walk we enter a transfigured landscape:
“The highest reaches of the beech –
six trees close-packed – were flame and they were water.
The green sun, the red cattle, the blue-faced sheep:
everything primary-bright, solid…”from ‘Cinderdale’ by Helen Farish
This is a selection that crackles with all the colour and energy of England’s most north-westerly county.
Jacob Polley is a poet and novelist who was born in Cumbria.
Poems by Josephine Dickinson, Helen Farish, WN Herbert, Kim Moore, MR Peacocke, Jacob Polley, Phoebe Power, William Scammell, David Scott and Claudine Toutoungi.
Cover illustration by Mark A Pearce.
