‘Village’, to most middle-Englanders, conjures up a cosy, living community. Perhaps the post office is threatened with closure or the bus timetable is to be cut, but the hanging baskets continue to be tended, the village green still hosts games of cricket, there are moneyed retirees or commuters eager to buy the houses. It is not like that, of course, in much of Britain’s Celtic fringe, and even less so in Europe’s more remote peasant communities. Political, social and economic change has drained many villages of their people, and only the old remain. Tom Pow visits one in Spain where the youngest inhabitant is seventy, and the sad conclusion of his book In Another World is that many villages ‘have only ten years of life left in them’.
‘Memory, home, love lost and mourned, elegy, earth and stone’ ‒ these are, Pow reminds his readers, ‘the materials of which I have always made my poems and stories’.
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