Travel
Ten Poems from Somerset
Selected and Introduced by Carrie Etter
Various Authors
£6.95
The old name for Somerset is Summerlands – a word that seems to contain the pastoral and slightly nostalgic atmosphere of this lovely area of Britain. These poems celebrate the intimacy of hidden valleys and tumbling rivers, and there’s a woodland walk which makes Samuel Taylor Coleridge long for the company of his beloved Sara.
The county is also a place of glorious towns and cities; Bath appears with its “gold-toned islands” and there’s also:
“The little old Somerset town you talk of,
that honey-gold, ever-sunlit,
late 1940s spot nestling in the green
scarplands of your memory…”from ‘Roots’ by Robert Walton
What emerges here is the very particular character of Somerset – reflected in its treasury of local words, as well as in its deeper history when parts of the county lay under the sea.
Carrie Etter is an American poet who has lived in the West Country since 2005.
Poems by David Briggs, Rachael Clyne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Carrie Etter, Gerald Griffin, Alyson Hallett, Pey Oh, Ruth Sharman, Robert Walton and Claire Williamson.
Cover illustration by Emy Lou Holmes.