Interview with Lynnell Edwards

Rachel Stark: First off, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview.  I'd like to start by talking about your subject matter.  Your most recent collection, The Highwayman's Wife, draws much of its energy from the way you revitalize mythology.  At the same time, you take on the English countryside with both the folklore of the highwayman and your numerous quotations from John Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar.  What is it about these things that are important to you?Lynnell Edwards: Some sort of unrelated things converged in the spring of 2004 that I think prompted the Highwayman series, the first of which was "Sonnet for the Highwayman."  I was tramping around in a very old cemetery in rural Kentucky where some of my Scottish ancestors (the McBrayers) from the 18th century were buried and I was talking with an elderly relative about that, and then an issue of Gourmet magazine arrived which had a feature on the Scottish Highlands, with several spectacular photos.  The photos were gorgeous; I can make only a modest case for Scottish cuisine, however.  After that first poem, I started exploring – in other words, I "Googled" – information about English ballads to see ... [ read more ]

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