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.