Voices from West Barbary
an anthology of Anglo-Cornish poetry 1549-1928
Edited by Alan M Kent
Foreword by Bernard Deacon
Francis Boutle Publishers
ISBN 0 9532388 8 1
Paperback 224 pages
Price per copy including postage: UK £10 Worldwide £12
The book
This anthology brings together for the first time in one collection the riches of Anglo-Cornish poetry from the Renaissance to the the twentieth century.
Among those authors included are well-known names like Sidney Godolphin, Humphry Davy, John Harris, Robert Stephen Hawker (the author of The Song of the Western Men, better known as 'Trelawny') and Arthur Quiller Couch, as well as less well-known figures like Margaret Ann Courtney, James Dryden Hosken, W. Herbert Thomas and the anonymous broadsheet writers who also helped shape the poetic landscape of Cornwall.
'West Barbary' was a term often used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe Cornwall, an apparently wild, dangerous and primitive land populated by smugglers, wreckers, food rioters and miners. Alan M Kent has reclaimed the term to express the uniqueness of Cornish identity.
The author
Alan M Kent was born in St Austell and grew up in the china clay mining region of mid-Cornwall. He is a poet, novelist and dramatist. In 1998 he was awarded a doctorate for his research into Cornish, Cornu-English and Anglo-Cornish literature. He is has recently completed a new verse adaptation of the Cornish mystery play trilogy known as Ordinalia.
Free teaching aids based on this book
See our teaching aids section for free programmes of study based on this book for Key Stages 2–4 and Advanced Level.
