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Coleshill

Coleshill asks four linked research questions:

• What is a rural rather than a conventionally urban psycho-geography?

• What can a farming community show us about the dialectic between humans and their environment?

• To what extent is any human approach to environmental degradation necessarily shaped by individual cultural context?

• What are the contemporary resources of literary and poetic tropes traditionally associated with the natural world?

The through-composed collection reads “Coleshill’’ as a palimpsest of British agricultural and social history. Its material is the quotidian and local: it explores a version of Heideggerian dwelling, and acknowledges the meanings the author ascribes to her environment. Its contribution to contemporary eco-poetics is this acknowledgment that human attention to the natural world is laden with narrative, emotion and intention. Coleshill addresses the pastoral tradition, a pertinent example of such cultural freight, both directly as content and through experiment with lyric form. A sequence of fourteen sonnets, largely slant-rhymed and with four-stress lines in irregular metre, continues the exploration of varieties of sonnet form in Folding the Real and Common Prayer. Borrowed and adapted lyric forms include an irregular terza rima and a “hymn” after Emily Dickinson; there are also sui generis forms. Each poem title alludes to either music or verse. Coleshill received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.