At Helpston

By Ronald Blythe (Black Dog Books, £20.00)

These essays, many of the presidential addresses to the John Clare Society, form a uniquie series of ‘meetings’ between the Northamptonshire labourer who became England’s finest nature poet and our own ‘rural intellectual’, the author of Akenfield. The work of the Suffolk artist Mary Newcomb provides a perfect foil to the lyricism of Blythe’s prose and the genius of Clare’s verse.