At Helpston: Meetings with John Clare (Mary Newcomb illustrator).

These essays, many of them presidential addresses to the John Clare Society, form a unique series of `meetings’ between the Northamptonshire labourer who became England’s finest nature poet and our own `rural intellectual’, the author of Akenfield, Ronald Blythe.  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.