Post-war Cornwall saw a flowering of the arts and literature. Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth spearheaded the modernist movement in Britain, the Leach Pottery attracted worldwide attention and Cornish culture was celebrated.

Writer and editor Denys Val Baker was at the heart of all this activity. His Britain’s Art Colony by the Sea became an iconic record, while The Cornish Review, which he launched in 1949, provided a regular platform for the area’s writers, critics and historians.

Some of the period’s finest writing appeared in his pages, although – as some critics pointed out–by no means all the contributors were Cornish-born. This anthology, drawing together articles, poetry and short stories, gives a flavour of those years: artist Peter Lanyon writing on ‘The Face of Penwith’, poems by the deaf and blind St Austell poet Jack Clemo, Sven Berlin on his world as a sculptor, Guido Morris expounding the finer points of letterpress printing, and Charles Marriott recalling Cornwall’s early art colonies. Then there’s Bernard Leach, Charles Causley, the irascible Arthur Caddick, memories of DH Lawrence in Cornwall and WS Graham’s celebrated poem The Voyages of Alfred Wallis.

Part of Val Baker’s bittersweet essay on the Review, from 1949-1952, is the source of these extracts. There was a second spell from 1966 to 1974. Ultimately, the Review foundered for lack of money and readers. Ironically, original copies are now very collectable.

One of the discoveries in this anthology is Bristol-born poet and short story writer Frances Bellerby. She was greatly admired by poets Charles Causley and Kathleen Raine, published several collections and was anthologised, and we’ve included one of her poems, Hospital Car, below.

Stephen Morris

Hospital Car

Impossible to forget sliding down, down
Into the starry pool of that little lighted town
Whilst black fog towered on the moorland side;
Nor the curious way in which I was forced to interpret
The gesture of the accustomed hand closing his gate –
A month before he died.
I had no knowledge of him, nor he of me.
We had travelled together without speech, weary
In our separate fashions; parted with a word and a smile.
Then how could hands’ quite ordinary gesture
In the March dusk have made me so blindingly sure
Of what tongue would never tell?
Frances Bellerby

The Cornish Review Anthology 1949-52, £10 (ISBN 978-1-904537-36-6), Westcliffe Books