Rhyming Weavers: And Other Country Poets Of Antrim And Down, John Hewitt (ed.)

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 - hand-loom 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 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.