During the nineteenth century there was a remarkable flowering of peasant verse in the Ulster counties of Antrim and Down. Witty, irreverent and deeply egalitarian, these poems were written by working people – hand-loom weavers, small farmers and country schoolmasters – for people much like themselves. The poets wrote in the ‘lively tongue’ of the Ulster-Scots vernacular and drew their themes from the landscape and life of the community at a time when the making of flax into linen played a basic part in the economic and social pattern.

John Hewitt’s ‘Rhyming Weavers’ is both a study and a celebration of the lives and work of these country poets. His extended introduction provides an accessible account of the context in which the poets wrote and is complemented by a select anthology that includes poems by well-known local bards such as David Herbison, James Orr and Samuel Thomson.

First published in 1974, Hewitt’s anthology was an act of recovery, an excavation of a vibrant aspect of Ulster’s literary history. Reissued again, fifty years later and with a new foreword by Frank Ferguson, ‘Rhyming Weavers’ remains a seminal work, making an important contribution to Ulster-Scots writing and to debates about language and identity in these islands.