This book brings together poems by eleven of Lincolnshire’s finest contemporary poets, all of whom are inspired in different ways by England’s second-largest county. Some of the contributors are incomers to Lincolnshire, seeing the county afresh. Others can trace their ancestors back hundreds of years and are conscious of their working lives as labourers, farming folk and tradesmen.

The poems largely eschew the cathedral city of Lincoln, focusing more on the less-populated and mysterious hinterland of small towns and isolated settlements. For every poet the county has an influence which is greater than the sum of the streets, fields, rivers and that great big sky.

Contributors: William Bedford, Clare Best, Michael Blackburn, Alison Brackenbury, David Cooke, Kathryn Daszkiewicz, Robert Etty, Sam Gardiner, Rennie Parker, Joel Stickley and Rory Waterman

Rory Waterman now lives in Nottingham, teaching creative writing at Nottingham Trent University, but returns to Lincolnshire regularly. His debut poetry collection is Tonight the Summer’s Over (Carcanet). He is joint editor of New Walk magazine and writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement