At Helpston: Meetings with John Clare

by Ronald Blythe

168 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2011

About the author

Ronald Blythe CBE was one of the UK's greatest living writers. His work, which won countless awards, includes Akenfield (a Penguin 20th-Century Classic and a feature film), Private Words, Field Work, Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends and numerous other titles. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded their prestigious Benson Medal in 2006. In 2017, he was appointed CBE for services to literature

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blythe is my local writer and he writes about things local, even if they are not.

He has a strong sense of place as did John Clare.

John Clare famously ended up in an asylum when he was dislocated from the world he knew.

There is a great deal more to the "ploughman poet" than madness and the enclosure act and rural idyll.

Blythe writes movingly in this book which brings the reality of Clare back into some sort of modern world perspective.

Clare might well have been marching to a different beat than many of his contemporaries but he was very much part of the essence of the land he was rooted in.

Difficult to overstate the simple pleasure of this book, its subject and author.