From the medieval dancers of Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne to Wesley, Tennyson, Lawrence and John Clare, William Bedford's The Dancers of Colbek explores his own early years among the market towns and seacoasts of Lincolnshire. There are prize-winning poems from his family's history of farming, and a sequence of poems voicing John Clare's experience of poverty and dispossession during the enclosures. The decline of rural ways of life is shown against a background of the arrival of American forces in the 1960s, their nuclear weapons dominating the landscapes where medieval dancers once celebrated pagan rites in midnight graveyards.

About the Author
William Bedford received an Arts Council Major Bursary for Poetry in 1978, Society of Authors Award in 1993, Yorkshire and Humberside Arts Award in 1993, Yorkshire Arts Award in 2000 for the publication of The Redlit Boys and a Royal Literary Fund Award in 2007. His first novel, Happiland, was runner-up for the 1990 Guardian Fiction Prize. Collecting Bottle Tops: Selected Poetry 1960-2008 and None of the Cadillacs Was Pink: selected short stories and non-fiction were both published in 2009.He was on the Editorial Board of Poetry Salzburg Review from 2007 to 2016, and was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University from 2008 to 2011. He was awarded first prize in the London Magazine International Poetry Competition in 2014.


Book Information
ISBN 9781909747579
Author William Bedford
Format Paperback
Page Count 90
Imprint Two Rivers Press
Publisher Two Rivers Press