Rhyming weavers : and other country poets of Antrim and Down

During the nineteenth century there was a remarkable flowering of peasant verse in the Ulster counties of Antrim and Down.

Witty, irreverent and deeply egalitarian, these poems were written by working people - handloom weavers, small farmers and country school-masters - for people much like themselves.

The poets wrote in the 'lively tongue' of the Ulster-Scots vernacular and drew their themes from the landscape and life of the community at a time when the making of flax into linen played a basic part in the economic and social pattern.

John Hewitt's Rhyming Weavers is both a study and a celebration of the lives and work of these country poets.

His extended introduction provides an accessible account of the context in which the poets wrote and is complemented by a select anthology that includes poems by well-known local bards such as David Herbison, James Orr and Samuel Thomson.

First published in 1974, Hewitt's anthology was an act of recovery, an excavation of a vibrant aspect of Ulster's literary history. Reissued now, thirty years later, with a new foreword by Tom Paulin, Rhyming Weavers remains a seminal work, making an important contribution to Ulster-Scots writing and to debates about language and identity in these islands.