The Songs of Edward Capern the Postman Poet

Edward Capern only had four months of schooling. He lived much of his life in the north Devon town of Bideford – also home to West Country fiddle players and singers Nick Wyke and Becki Driscoll – where he walked the high and winding lanes as a postman, often composing as he went. Wyke notes the walking rhythm as an inspiration for his and Driscoll's settings, which are contemporary but drawn from 19th-century West Country string band styles. The poems celebrate Devon, its landscape and common people, while they are also calls for a fairer life and society.
Almost 200 years after his birth, Capern is suddenly experiencing a belated rediscovery: there is a new selection of his work, a novel about him by Liz Shakespeare and, of course, this. Full of warmth and a powerful sense of self, the sprung rhythms of the tunes are fine companions to the words. The poems are full of birds, the sea, the hills and the hearths of Devon. They are bucolic as the Sussex folk songs of the Copper Family often are, but never losing sight of the struggles of the working classes, and the desire for a more just system. In this, they speak to contemporary concerns, and the music carries them firmly into the world's present, not its nostalgic reflection.