Train Songs - Don Paterson

'This is the night mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order...'
-- W.H. Auden

Wordsworth
was the first laureate of locomotives: in fact he railed against them,
and against the consequent opening up of the Lakes to holiday hordes
('On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway'). His dismay was
echoed down the decades by disturbed ruralists, and yet the train has
become part of our psychic landscape: some of the best-loved English
poems - Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop', or Philip Larkin's 'Whitsun
Weddings' - have celebrated carriages, platforms and waiting rooms,
while locomotion has inspired some of the most characteristic poetry of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Stevenson, Hardy and MacNeice, Betjeman and
Auden (whose 'Night Mail' was written to accompany a 1930s GPO
documentary about the postal express from Euston to Glasgow).

Co-edited by two of our most distinguished poets, Train Songs
offers a round tour - from Wordsworth to Hugo Williams and beyond -
starting from the poetry of departures and brief encounters, but taking
in the American Blues, the troop trains of two world wars, and the
addiction to speed which characterised the European revolutions. Trains
have carried the freight of history from the Industrial Revolution
onwards - the Armstice in 1918 was signed in a railway carriage, the
death camps were organised around train timetables - and this new anthology shows how the train in all its forms has exercised a unique
hold upon our collective unconscious.