Humfrey Coningsby - Softcover

Jonathan Davidson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908853484 ISBN 13: 9781908853486

Publisher: Valley Press, 2015

Synopsis

For Humfrey Coningsby - lord of the manor of Neen Sollars in South Shropshire - the world was a place of wonders and despair, of love found and then forsaken. He was a cantankerous, sentimental, petulant traveller; a gentleman soldier; a sly linguist; a confidant of Princes and Emperors; a receiver of such delights, and a doomed versifier. He walked out of this world on 10th October, 1610 - and now he walks back in, with barely a word of explanation.

This series of poems, complaints, explanations and demands for satisfaction forms the narrative of a life still being lived over four hundred years later. The Siege of Strigonium in 1595 was wretched; life in Aleppo in 2015 is worse.

Humfrey Coningsby's story is also the subject of a BBC Radio Four Afternoon Drama by Jonathan Davidson, to be broadcast in June 2015.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Davidson was born in 1964 in Didcot, South Oxfordshire, and now lives in Coventry. He won an Eric Gregory award in 1990, and is the author of two previous collections of poetry and two pamphlets. He is also the author of eight radio plays broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, along with adaptations of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns and W.S. Graham's The Nightfishing for radio. Find him on Twitter @JFDavidson1964.

Edition details

• Publisher: Valley Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908853484
• ISBN 13: 9781908853486
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 38