A Staffordshire Collection

Staffordshire is a beautiful and diverse county, and this diversity is part of its appeal. We have the engine of the potteries in the north, areas of natural beauty such as Cannock Chase and The Moorlands, provincial towns each with a rich history, and in between the county is crisscrossed with country roads, lanes and canals that link hundreds of villages and hamlets.
In 2016 Staffordshire County Council's Libraries & Arts Service took the decision to develop a Staffordshire poetry collection. Our aim was to create a picture of the county in words, to capture its diversity and in so doing help to create a cultural identity and awareness for the county as a whole.
We have of course a rich heritage of poetry going back centuries, but we wished to create a feeling of life in Staffordshire as it is today. The poems in The Collection are therefore contemporary and as varied in form and tone and content as the county itself. If you live in the south of the county and are inspired to visit places further north (and vice-versa of course) then that in itself will be reward enough.
I am delighted to have this enjoyable and super collection now available in book form alongside the on-line version, which also makes the poems available and provides links so that the poets can be heard reading their own poems. Our special thanks and appreciation for this go to former Staffordshire Poet Laureate Mal Dewhirst, and to Offa's Press who published 'The Poetry of Staffordshire' in 2015 which in some ways provided the initial impetus and the idea that here was something capable of further development by the County Council. We are grateful to Offa's Press for allowing us to include in 'The Staffordshire Poetry Collection' a number of poems from their own publication.

A delight for those who love poetry and those who love Staffordshire, this vivid collection of poems lifts the region to the light, allowing us, in the words of Arnold Bennett, to "behold it, as it were, for the first time".
Liz Berry