Alan M. Kent is one of Cornwall’s leading poets and one of its most distinctive voices. His subjects are love, death, nature, language, politics and Celticity, intensified by what the author calls the ‘hope of place’ in landscapes at home and overseas, and employing traditional forms as well as dialect and motifs from popular culture.
His poetry is rooted in the Cornish literary heritage and offers insights into Cornish identity and history and presents an important re-imagining of contemporary ‘Britishness’.
The product of twenty years’ work, this volume draws together poems from collections published between 1990 and 2010.
Alan M. Kent was born in St Austell, Cornwall, in 1967. He is a prize-winning poet, novelist and dramatist, whose collections of poetry include Grunge (1994), Out of the Ordinalia (1995), The Hensbarrow Homilies (2002), Love and Seaweed (2002), Assassin of Grammar (2005), Stannary Parliament (2006) and Druid Offsetting (2008). He is also the editor of Voices from West Barbary: An Anthology of Anglo-Cornish Poetry 1549–1928 (2000) and The Dreamt Sea: An Anthology of Anglo-Cornish Poetry 1928–2004 (2004), and the author of The Literature of Cornwall: Continuity, Identity, Difference 1000–2000 (2000) and The Theatre of Cornwall: Space, Place, Performance (2010). He has also translated the Cornish Mystery Play Cycle known as the Ordinalia (2005).
‘these English-medium poems deserve a wide readership outside Cornwall and should serve as stark reminders of how cultural and linguistic diversities have – and are – being eroded’
