Changing Places

The place I was born is not in Lancashire any more. I grew up in what wasn’t the New Forest then. I now live in a house which owes its existence to the Enclosure Acts. Sometimes the place you belong isn’t on the map. These ideas were playing on my mind as I put the pamphlet together. The poems explore the landscapes we cherish and visit, protest to maintain, and summon in pathetic fallacy. We view these landscapes as an essential part of what many of us take to be England. The truth is more complicated and has little to do with a pastoral idyll. Most of what we see from our car window, or fell-top vantage point, or weekly dose of Countryfile is there on sufferance, and in the service of our bellies rather than our souls.

(Carl Tomlinson / Fair Acre Press, 2021)

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