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These exquisite mini essays reflect on the natural landscape, the changing seasons, village life, art, poetry, the stories that ancient churches tell, the Christian year. They refresh ones vision of ones own daily routine and surroundings and can be read over and over again, like poetry.
Canterbury Press is proud to have acquired these backlist Ronald Blythe titles, consisting of illustrated collections of the authors regular weekly column on the back page of the Church Times where, with a poets eye, he observes the comings and goings of the rural world he sees from his ancient farmhouse in the South of England. Each volume was critically acclaimed on publication.
With reverence and love, Britain’s most admired rural writer chronicles daily life in the Stour valley village, finding beauty and significance in its sheer ordinariness as well as in its many literary, artistic and historic associations. The year takes its shape from the seasons of nature and the feasts and festivals of the Christian year. Each informs and illuminates the other in this loving celebration of nature’s gifts and neighbourly friendship. Literature, poetry, spirituality and memory all merge to create an exquisite series of stories of our times. These delightful essays first appeared in the ‘Word From Wormingford’ column, a popular back page feature of the Church Times for some 20 years. It was praised as one of the finest journalistic columns by the Guardian in November 2012.
Blythe's reflection on a lifetime in gardening.
A meditation on the painter John Nash's old home.
Timeless reflections on local life, farming, literature, the churchs year, the seasons, that transcend boundaries of place and time.
Long recognised as Britain’s greatest living rural writer, Ronald Blythe draws together literature, poetry, spirituality and memory which all merge to create an exquisite commentary on our times that is at once celebratory and elegiac. In this eleventh and final collection of his beloved 'Word from Wormingford', Ronald Blythe opens us our eyes to the small miracles that happen everywhere in ordinary life. With a poet’s deftness he gives us language with which to speak about the experiences that touch every life, but so often leave us speechless – life’s great joys and its incomprehensible sorrows. His writing awakens us to the colours and scents of the seasons and the weather, lets us listen to the myriad remembered conversations stored in his attic mind, evokes the smell of old books and all the memories they conjure up, and shows us how to be thankful for the inestimable blessing of simple routine.
For most of human history, we have lived our daily lives in a close relationship with the land. Yet now, for the first time, more people are living in urban rather than rural areas, bringing about an estrangement. This book, by acclaimed author Jules Pretty, is fundamentally about our relationship with nature, animals and places. A series of interlinked essays leads readers on a voyage that weaves through the themes of connection and estrangement between humans and nature. The journey shows how our modern lifestyles and economies would need six or eight Earths if the entire worlds population adopted our profligate ways. Pretty shows that we are rendering our own world inhospitable and so risk losing what it means to be human: unless we make substantial changes, Gaia threatens to become Grendel. Ultimately, however, the book offers glimpses of an optimistic future for humanity, in the very face of climate change and pending global environmental catastrophe.
Concern about the 'decline of community', and the theme of 'community spirit', are internationally widespread in the modern world. The English past has featured many representations of declining community, expressed by those who lamented its loss in quite different periods and in diverse genres. This book analyses how community spirit and the passing of community have been described in the past – whether for good or ill – with an eye to modern issues, such as the so-called 'loneliness epidemic' or the social consequences of alternative structures of community. It does this through examination of authors such as Thomas Hardy, James Wentworth Day, Adrian Bell and H.E. Bates, by appraising detective fiction writers, analysing parish magazines, considering the letter writing of the parish poor in the 18th and 19th centuries, and through the depictions of realist landscape painters such as George Morland. K. D. M. Snell addresses modern social concerns, showing how many current preoccupations had earlier precedents. In presenting past representations of declining communities, and the way these affected individuals of very different political persuasions, the book draws out lessons and examples from the past about what community has meant hitherto, setting into context modern predicaments and judgements about 'spirits of community' today.
From the time that John Constable made its waterways and rural landscapes famous, the Stour Valley in East Anglia has been a haunt for artists, writers, poets, musicians and gardeners. Ronald Blythe perpetuates this rich artistic heritage from an ancient farmhouse, with its three-acre naturalistic garden, that has been a gathering place for literary and artistic friends for almost seventy years. Stour Seasons is the tenth collection of his Word From Wormingford columns that have appeared on the back page of the Church Times for over 20 years. Britain’s greatest living rural writer observes in rich detail the gifts that each season of the year brings and in doing so, evokes a world of beauty, friendship and wonder at the simple pleasures that make everyday life the miracle that it is.