Description

Following his Forward-prize shortlisted Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webb’s breathtaking second poetry collection summons the West Country of his youth, a place where the real and the magical, folklore and modernity, life and death, collide

‘Ralf Webb is an ethnographer of the present. He is interested in everyday life in the extreme’ Peter Gizzi

Highway Cottage weaves the story of a strange homecoming. A young poet travels to the heart of the English countryside – back to the West Country village where he grew up. Descending into the valley where the small riverside community still resides, he finds himself within a dreamlike landscape, peopled by uncanny figures: drone operators and hunters; half-familiar friends; local historians, and braying councillors trying desperately to oust a community of Travellers. Hovering between reality and folklore, the locale is at once idyllic and in decay; the visitor is both unsettled and soothed by it. Slowly, we start to sense that both villagers and poet might be under threat – not just from the future, but from the past.

This book-length sequence of poems represents a ground-breaking artistic achievement by acclaimed poet Ralf Webb. Blending the eerie musicality of children’s rhymes with echoes of traditional balladry and free verse, the collection swells to an extraordinary chorus. With great clarity and affection, but not a trace of sentimentality, Webb conjures a precise vision of a rural community, surfacing the deep and urgent tensions – personal, political, and environmental – that run through Britain today. The result is a unique portrait of contemporary country life, enchanting and unnerving in equal measure.

Publisher Review

Stunning … a masterful exploration of the past, the present, the political, and the pastoral in all its spectre — Rachel Long The poems of Highway Cottage embody the intangibility of return. In their midst, to revisit is always to witness anew and, if fortunate, to be renewed also — Victoria Adukwei Bulley Praise for Ralf Webb * – * Ralf Webb is an ethnographer of the present. He is interested in everyday life in the extreme — Peter Gizzi Never less than razor-sharp. With a storyteller’s flair, he evokes a world of shifting terrains … It all feels gloriously, anarchically new — Julia Copus An important voice in British poetry — Eley Williams This is close-range language, magnifying without prejudice both the beautiful and the hard — Anne Boyer