New British Poetry: 3 Southwest England


A few years ago scientists working in the limestone caves near Cheddar in Somerset discovered a quantity of skeletons belonging to the Stone-Age inhabitants. As a sideline to their work, they asked genetic researchers to compare the DNA profiles of those skeletons to those people now living in the vicinity whose ancestors are known to have been in the region 'for a long time'. Astonishingly, several of the families in the surrounding villages were found to be descendents of people occupying the caves thousands of years earlier.

In some respects, this discovery epitomizes an essential facet of how the inhabitants of southwest England perceive themselves. As the legendary realm of King Arthur, the last English stronghold of the Celts, and the power-base for the so-called modern Green Politics, the people of the West Country of England are exceptionally conscious of how far their roots extend in the earth beneath their feet. For writers and artists, it has long proven to be a fertile source of inspiration, being home to novelists like Thomas Hardy, the painters brought together at St. Ives, and poets almost without number. Critics sometimes complain that southern England is now generally a world of capitalist urgency and emotional complacency, but there is comparatively little evidence to support this view, judging from the poetry produced there. POETRY NOW: SOUTHERN ENGLAND 2002, edited by Natalie Nightingale (Peterborough: Poetry Now, 2002) brings together 190 pages of verse from this region, and many of these principal concerns-environment and heritage chief among them-are evident on every page. As with previous Poetry Now anthologies I've discussed (see 'New British Poetry 1', for example) copyright restrictions prevent from quoting passages directly, but a sample overview of the book is instructive. For many of the 200 or so poets included here, nature is in the forefront of their thinking-about themselves, and the issues confronting their society. Sometimes, that 'nature' is a tamed one, a back garden or walk by an ancient monument, and sometimes it is raw and elemental, the sea or the high moors. But regardless of its aspect, there is a powerful sense that seasonal rhythms are understood and observed, and an individual's place in the passing of Time is, although significant, a minute feature of an otherwise enormous unknowable project. For all its frequent crudities style and subject-it is not an anthology of work by 'professionals'-there remains a deeply-felt link to the home and habits of heroic forebears.

The copyright of the article New British Poetry: 3 Southwest England in Modern British Poetry is owned by Dr J D Ballam. Permission to republish New British Poetry: 3 Southwest England in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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