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2016 INTRODUCTION TO Homecoming ANDREW FORSTER Published by Smith Doorstop, 2014 In 2008 I moved to Cumbria to take up a job with the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, after 21 years of living and working in Scotland. I was born in South Yorkshire and I’d never lived in Cumbria before so the ‘homecoming’ of the title isn’t a traditional one. The ‘home’ it refers to is the North of England, but the book explores the different notions of what a ‘home’ can actually be. In my job I worked in an office on a site that included Dove Cottage, home to William Wordsworth, and the lanes that Wordsworth walked were my ‘office corridors’. It’s perhaps not surprising that the poems I wrote at this time were about Cumbria: its landscape, natural history, and what it meant to be living there. If you are familiar with Wordsworth’s poetry, there are very few places you can go in the Lake District where you don’t encounter it. He is an inescapable presence in some of my poems, haunting the book in the way he haunts the area. I, like the Lake Poets before me, walked the hills, but mainly at weekends or on public holidays, when I was already thinking about what I needed to do when I returned to work. Despite the pressures of modern life we can still occasionally manage to touch the ‘sublime’, and that’s one of the things my poems are trying to do. Animal encounters are another continuing source of fascination for me. I think we respond to animals in a way that can’t always be explained by science – we may know about the flight patterns and feeding habits of bats but this doesn’t explain our fascination for them, and this is where I see a role for poetry, which can move easily between natural history and myth. As I settled in Cumbria and the book took shape, I began to reconnect more with South Yorkshire as well, through visits to family and through memory, and the book became about homecoming in a wider sense. An evocative perspective on living amidst the forces of nature Poetry Book Society @NewWritingNorth www.readregional.com #ReadRegional
