Inpress Newsletter
Synopsis
Simon Armitage's Book of the Year 2011 in The Guardian. "I don't ever remember being as moved by a book of poems." Simon Armitage, The Guardian The eighth poetry collection from one of The Times’ ‘Six best authors ever in the North of England’. Glyn Hughes wrote about his latest collection: “This book follows the course of a year’s cancer from acceptance to joyous life again through closeness to nature. On one of my first nights in the oncology ward, I dreamed that a wall-clock at the foot of my bed was replaced with a scroll covered in runes. I had to decipher these in order to regain health. On waking, I instantly understood. There were three parts to my recovery. One was the medical attention that I was receiving. The second was my mental attitude. The third lay in my spiritual strength. These poems belong to the third of these categories. I had recently acquired use of an isolated stone hut (the ‘Bull-Box’) in the Ribble Valley. The time spent there was my healing.” (The Irish Times) "After Glyn Hughes was diagnosed with cancer, he spent a year in a ‘Bull-Box’, an isolated stone building in the Ribble Valley, recording the changes in the natural world across the seasons, its bleak skylines, hard frosts and summer meadows. The result is A Year in the Bull-Box... an unbearably beautiful calendar-sequence in which the poet’s ‘tiny life’ is overwhelmingly ‘humbled’ by lavish Nature’s rich ‘extravagance’." Andy Croft, Morning Star "The book’s concern with how 'flowers give the light back in cups of beauty' and 'recompense the dark / and bandage the damaged soul' (‘Flowers’) has throughout a resonant honesty and directness that is frequently moving, frequently thought-provoking in what it has to say about human morality. Warmly recommended." Acumen "Written in a free verse where all the lines are self-contained units of sense whose sound is clear, precise, A Year in the Bull-Box is a book of wisdom and grace." James Sutherland-Smith Glyn Hughes is best known as a Northern poet, artist and novelist with a string of prizes for his work (Guardian Fiction Prize, David Higham Prize, Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Welsh Arts Council Poet’s Prize; plus shortlists for the Whitbread, Portico and James Tait Black Prizes). A Guardian poll of readers in 2005 chose two of his books as ‘Eco-Classics’, while he was picked by The Times as one of the ‘Six best authors ever in the North of England’. He lived in the Calder Valley for forty years, and died in 2011.
This title has not been reviewed yet.
Have you read A Year in the Bull-Box by Glyn Hughes? - Be the first to write a review
