Constellated When the atoms in my body return to stars They will not remember this five am out my window, neither the moor asleep on the horizon, nor, across her darkened hips, the scatters of bright yellow gorse.

Asylum presents the kind of journey John Clare might have taken in 1841 if, when he escaped the madhouse, he'd been traveling in his head rather than on his feet. Lola Haskins starts out with as little sense of direction as Clare had, and yet, after wandering all over the map, she too finally reaches her destination. The four sections in this book are where she rests for the night. The first looks tenderly at the cycle of human life. The second renders the world around her as if she were painting it. By the third, having lost her way, she turns to the supernatural and in the process is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The book ends as she finds it again and arrives in her dear north-west England, having learned from John Clare that she “can be homeless at home and half-gratified to find I can be happy anywhere.”

Spanning three decades, this collection of Ronald Blythe's work on John Clare offers a unique contribution to the study of Clare and his tradition.

Clare records that it was 'a very old custom among villagers in summer time to stick a piece of greensward full of field flowers and place it as an ornament in their cottages which ornaments are called Midsummer Cushions.' This 'cottage custom'suggested the title to him for this collection. The texts of the poems are those which Clare himself wanted to publish in 1832, but for which he could not find a sufficient number of subscribers. Almost a third of the book's 391 poems were published for the first time when this collection first appeared in 1978. These poems, edited by Anne Tibble, a Yorkshire-born scholar and biographer of John Clare, finally cement the poet's long-deserved reputation as our foremost naturalist poet of the English countryside.