Vital Stream

"Vital Stream" takes the form of 133 sonnets that revisit six extraordinary months in 1802, a threshold year for William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Parted when they were very young, the siblings eventually set up home together in the Lake District, where they remained for the rest of their lives. After two years in Grasmere, William became engaged to Mary Hutchinson. There followed an intense period of re-adjustment for all three, and for his French lover Annette Vallon, with whom he had a daughter.At that time, the Wordsworth siblings wrote some of their most beautiful work; these were their last months of living alone, and their writing has an elegiac quality. Other complications coloured their lives, to do with Coleridge and his failing marriage. Lucy Newlyn draws all this material into the vital stream of her sequence.Lucy Newlyn was Fellow and Tutor in English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and became a Professor in 2005. Her first collection, "Ginnel" (Carcanet) appeared in 2005.