Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry

Somerset is a county that will not hold still. Exmoor's red sandstone spine falls away eastward to Mendip limestone, to Hamstone, to the marine clay of the basin — and across the whole of it, water moves. A twelve-metre tide resets the coast twice a day. The peat closes over what was built on it. The Levels stay dry only because pumps lift the water back against its own weight, season after season.

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​Exmoor to Levels in Poetry reads the county through what lies beneath
the visible surface: the marine clay under the peat, the Hamstone
hauled from Ham Hill, the lead the Romans smelted on Mendip. Each of
the seventy-six poems holds a single place and the deep forces that
made it — the geology, the history, the human engineering pressed
against slow time. This is not a guidebook. Read it as a map of
pressures, not of roads.

 

What's inside the collection

 

​The collection runs from Exmoor's heights to the drowning Levels, from
Iron Age hillfort to working reactor. Dunkery Beacon at five hundred
and nineteen metres, its saturated peat creeping downhill and slowly
lowering the roof of Somerset. The Roman silver workings at
Charterhouse on Mendip, logged drop by drop in a stalactite growing a
millimetre a century. Glastonbury Tor standing on its cap of Bridport
Sand above a plain of winter water. Four hundred buried timber posts
at Stanton Drew, a monument surviving as an architecture of voids.
Cheddar, Wells, Bath, Wookey Hole, Watchet, Minehead, Ham Hill, Tarr
Steps, Burrow Mump, Steart Marshes, Hinkley Point.
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Who it's for

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This is a book for anyone who knows Somerset — whether you walk Exmoor
and the Quantocks, live with the winter flood on the Levels, grew up in
the county and moved away, or carry it in your family's memory from
further afield. Readers in the UK, the United States and Canada have
found their way to the series. If you value landscape writing that
treats place as a working archive rather than a view — in the tradition
of Robert Macfarlane, Simon Armitage or Kathleen Jamie — Exmoor to
Levels was written with you in mind. It makes a considered gift for the
walker, the local historian, or the reader with West Country roots.
 

A sample from the collection

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The Bristol Channel scours the coastal faults,
a twelve-metre tide grinding against marine clay.
Inland, the rivers funnel the moorland's mass
down from the red sandstone of Dunkery
and the fractured limestone of the Mendip gorges,
settling it into an impermeable basin
capped with a deep layer of organic peat.

The ground is carved into a rigid grid of rhynes,
where water must be pumped upward,
hoisted blindly against its own dead weight,
lifting the catchment back to the sea.

The floodwater lacks malice. The rock does not yearn.
They simply outlast the pumps.
 

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