Blood Earth & Medicine

Description

Blood Earth & Medicine is a collection of poems charting the progress of a casual agricultural labourer voyaging through the seasons, seeing with strange eyes the ocean of hedgerows and woods, farms and farmyards, flocks and orchards, the work of hands and generations of hands. A way of life little known about, for by its very nature it is nomadic and impermanent.

The sequence begins and ends with a hurdle-maker working in a hazel coppice, one of the most ancient of agricultural technologies, little changed since neolithic times.

The sense of a committed lived life behind the verse is very strong and appealing. – Seamus Heaney (in a letter to the author)

I believe you have captured in relatively few words what makes a countryman tick, what a farming family used to be and still is in some of the more outlandish places. I found it emotional and evocative, and can only congratulate you with the utmost sincerity for capturing the spirit of simple traditional rural man. It is a long time since I have been so moved. – John Thorley, Sec. National Sheep Association

What immediately struck me about this book was how well it recorded very humble-seeming, if once essential and ubiquitous, forms of labour. They are ones, though we may not fully accept and realise it, that lie deep in almost all our archetypal selves… a precious and impressive evocation of that very ancient way of life… I have always pitied the young and urbanised… here is a vividly close memory of what they have missed. – John Fowles

Not an ounce of sentimentality. – Nicholas Sloan

I found your poems very striking and evocative… Alas that so much of this life is disappearing and it is very good that you are setting it down to be recorded and appreciated while there is still time. – Winston Graham