    |
Borderland
- Volume III of the Wormingford Trilogy.
Borderland - Volume III of the Wormingford
Trilogy by Ronald Blythe - 2005
- hardback - 424pp - 140x223mm - 24 b+w illustrations by Mary
newcomb -
Price £16.95 - ISBN 09549286-0-1
Ronald Blythe lives on the Suffolk-Essex border where, in addition
to his
work as a writer, he is lay reader to the united benefice of Wormingford,
Mount Bures and Little Hawkesley. Over the last twelve years his
weekly
journal for the Church Times has grown into a beautifully observed
chronicle of country life. The first volume, Word from Wormingford
(1997) is a calendar of the Christian year in this corner of East
Anglia. This now celebrated meditation on the changing seasons
was followed in 2000 by Out of the Valley, a record of village
life from the dual perspective of one who remains at the heart
of a working community but who, as poet and historian, observes
it at a distance providing us with a lyrical interpretation of
the English countryside in our time.
|
|
|
Today
Ronald Blythe is a unique voice in a landscape where 'a strange
quietness' prevails; where farming is a highly mechanised
agri-business, where the old farmhouses are lived in by London
commuters and its medieval churches are empty but for a few
elderly parishioners. Borderland, which completes Blythe's
Wormingford trilogy, is in no way a requiem for traditional
village life. His perspective over many years is essentially
optimistic, seldom judgemental. He observes the strirrings
of new life in the countryside, illuminated by his own experiences.
"The observations are sharp, the writing eloquent and
memorable." As Susan Hill and Richard Mabey suggest,
Blythe's trilogy deserves its place alongside those other
eminent parson diarists Gilbert White and Francis Kilvert
in the literature of the English countryside.
|
|
|
