Cornwall In Verse - Tide To Tor In Poetry by Alden Carrow

Cornwall is not cliffs and cream teas alone — it is granite and gorse, chapel bells and harbour lamps, the long memory of tide against stone.

Cornwall In Verse - Tide To Tor In Poetry travels the length of the county in more than seventy short journeys: from the wild edge of Land's End to the moorland hush of Bodmin, from the painter's light of St Ives to the mermaid's cove at Zennor, from Tintagel's ruined towers to the tin-dark engine houses of Redruth and Camborne. Each poem settles on a single place — a cove, a quay, a moor, a garden — and holds it still for four measured verses, echoing the sea's own steady return.

Here myth walks beside labour: smugglers and saints, miners and gardeners, net-menders and ferry crews. Flora Day ribbons turn a few pages from Poldark's silent engine houses; the reawakened Lost Gardens of Heligan sit not far from the tide-locked causeway at St Michael's Mount. Written to be read aloud, these poems ask only that you wade in and come away with the sand still in your shoes.

The second volume in poet Alden Carrow's British Counties In Verse series, this collection doesn't explain Cornwall — it lets the place speak for itself, tide to tor.