This collection was beautiful. It left me feeling emotional, and I’ll surely return to many of these poems.

Ralf Webb is quite simply a fantastic poet. Highway Cottage is a superb blend of nature, idealism and realism. Instead of Romanticism, Webb uses the natural landscape to explore humanity at its basest rather than escape. There is the macabre, there is grief, and there is hope, life and desire. Thoroughly enjoyable to read and definitely a collection to return to and read in a new light each time.

Highway Cottage is an impressive second collection from Ralf Webb. Rural in its focus, it pulls in the pastoral alongside the uncanny and the enduring effects of history alongside the challenges of the present. As such, it grabs the reader's attention in a way that poetry should. The poems switch nicely between the timeless and the urgently contemporary. Worth your time.

Equal parts tender and visceral, Highway Cottage is a love story to a place that only existed in the gloaming of growing up.

It reads like old English folk song at times, a body horror book others.

Like most good poetry, it leaves a lot to interpretation, with the title piece giving a lot of questions for you to think on in its prose.

My particular favourite is A Singing Contest on Thorn Hill, going back to my earlier point about old English folk song.