Ralf Webb Highway Cottage Paperback Book

Following his Forwardprize shortlisted Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webbs breathtaking second poetry collection summons the West Country of his youth, a place where the real and the magical, folklore and modernity, life and death, collideRalf Webb is an ethnographer of the present. He is interested in everyday life in the extreme Peter GizziHighway Cottage weaves the story of a strange homecoming. A young poet travels to the heart of the English countryside back to the West Country village where he grew up. Descending into the valley where the small riverside community still resides, he finds himself within a dreamlike landscape, peopled by uncanny figures drone operators and hunters halffamiliar friends local historians, and braying councillors trying desperately to oust a community of Travellers. Hovering between reality and folklore, the locale is at once idyllic and in decay the visitor is both unsettled and soothed by it. Slowly, we start to sense that both villagers and poet might be under threat not just from the future, but from the past. This booklength sequence of poems represents a groundbreaking artistic achievement by acclaimed poet Ralf Webb. Blending the eerie musicality of childrens rhymes with echoes of traditional balladry and free verse, the collection swells to an extraordinary chorus. With great clarity and affection, but not a trace of sentimentality, Webb conjures a precise vision of a rural community, surfacing the deep and urgent tensions ... | Ralf Webb Highway Cottage Paperback Book