The Pieces Slide, The Pattern Holds: Dunkery Beacon, Hopkins's Pied Beauty and my next Book!

What do a Victorian priest praising a spotted cow and a wind-scoured Somerset hilltop have in common? Everything doesn't have to match to hold together. We begin in Wales, 1877, with Gerard Manley Hopkins's Pied Beauty—ten and a half lines praising the dappled, the "counter, original, spare, strange"—a poem that finds God not in perfection but in mixture, unpublished until 29 years after Hopkins's death. Then we climb to Dunkery Beacon, the highest point in Somerset: a Bronze Age cemetery, a Norse word, three ruined signal fires, and a concrete survey pillar, all sharing a few dozen paces of gritstone—nothing on it from the same century, all of it slowly sliding downhill together, pushed by water freezing in the rock. This week's big news: Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry is finished, and arrives in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September. No pre-orders—just the date to remember. We talk honestly about what the book is, how it differs from the earlier volumes, and three small, no-obligation ways you can help it find readers. Enter our competition: Suggest a guest poem by emailing [email protected] for your chance to win a signed copy of Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss next week's walk.