A legend of the walking world and an undiscovered poet

Imagine an author who is a legend within his own field, with over fifty books to his name, but who has been writing in another field, almost undiscovered, for over 60 years.
Colin Speakman is just such an author. Although his first published work was a poem in Poetry and Audience in 1960, he made his name as a writer on walking and an environmental and transport campaigner.

Colin was involved in the creation of The Dales Way long-distance walk and authored the first and most authoritative guidebook on the subject, as well as a wide range of other guides and books on walking, plus work on geologists John Phillips and Adam Sedgwick and a work on his adopted county of Yorkshire. His classic collection of stories from the Yorkshire Dales, The Nut Brown Maid, is also about to be reprinted.

However, poetry has been a constant with Colin throughout (at least) seven decades and this book, ‘So Let It Be: Collected Poems’ brings together all his previous pamphlets and collections, as well as early, and new and uncollected poems. As might be expected, there is a strong emphasis on wild nature but there are also poems about the deep history of England – the north and Yorkshire in particular – political poems, musical poems and love poems, the fruits of a long, well-lived life.