Millom

Alan Hollinghurst

  • Sea to the West by Norman Nicholson
    Faber, 64 pp, £3.00, June 1981, ISBN 0 571 11729 5
  • Out for the Elements by Andrew Waterman
    Carcanet, 151 pp, £3.95, October 1981, ISBN 0 85635 377 9
  • Between Here and Now by R. S. Thomas
    Macmillan, 110 pp, £5.95, November 1981, ISBN 0 333 32186 3
  • Poetry Introduction Five
    Faber, 121 pp, £5.25, January 1982, ISBN 0 571 11793 7

There was a time when local or regional poetry was greeted and respected as a romantic phenomenon: its origins far from the literary vortex of the metropolis were the guarantee of authenticity, bardic purity of inspiration, and a closer access to the nature as well as the language of men. Even now, there is something disconcerting about the rural adage, as if beneath its apparent irrelevance or banality some potency or spell resided, choosing simplicity itself as a disguise.

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