Travel
Ten Poems from Northumberland
Selected and Introduced by Jane Burn
Various Authors
£6.95
Northumberland is border country – a place of ballads and battles and windswept beaches where grand castles stand sentinel. This mini anthology celebrates the wild beauty of the county’s landscapes, where the past still seems to linger in the ruggedness of rock and moorland.
Water laps at the edges of many of the poems. There’s an evocation of crossing the causeway to Holy Island as the tide swirls inward and a paean to Berwick upon Tweed with its “platinum threadings of submersion”. There’s also a poignant elegy to the famous sycamore that was illegally felled in 2023:
“This is how we will keep on planting you into our lives,
though none of it can echo the way that you held
the rain in your arms, or how you wore the colours
of autumn on your bonfire crown…”from ‘The Sycamore’s Ghost’ by Jane Burn
The poem honours a tree that was loved by many, keeping it alive for us all in language.
Jane Burn is a poet and artist who lives in an off-grid cottage in Northumberland.
Poems by Bob Beagrie, Jane Burn, John Challis, Linda France, Harry Gallagher, Wilfrid Gibson, Carmen Marcus, Katrina Porteous, Degna Stone and James Tait.
Cover illustration by Jane Burn.
