Ralf Webb – Highway Cottage (Penguin Random House, 2025)
Ralf Webb’s second collection of poetry, Highway Cottage (Penguin Random House, 2025), is a richly populated space filled with family, friends and those local to the lands he returns to, which is the world of the West Country. The cover, with its twisting, blossoming apple tree cantered in a verdant, dandelion-heavy forest, nicely primes the reader for poems of about the natural world. The front also sports a half-hidden figure, legs dangling beneath the gnarly tree trunk, and is suggestive of solitude and the passing of youth and innocence, which appear in Webb’s poetry collection. These concerns, among other choices of style and substance, give a strong Wordsworthian flavour.
‘Highway Cottage’, the title poem and my favourite among the opening half-a-dozen poems of the first section, begins with the sing-song simplicity:
‘There is a little house, down a little lane,
Somewhere way out west
Between one place and another place.’
It has the vagueness of a fairy tale, the feel of a nursery rhyme, and represents elements of unreality, memory and dream-space that are present in many of the poems in the collection. The title is itself lightly unsettling with its juxtaposition of the past, rootedness and the rural (‘cottage’) and modernity, transition and the urban (‘highway’); the tension of the two words further emphasises the fundamental challenge of one’s own complicity in the march of modern life and its impact on the countryside.
The uncertainty and sense of make-believe continue in the second stanza with the sentence: ‘I think I stayed there, once.’ How to read this line? What to make of it? What are the implications of thinking one stayed somewhere and knowing? And what to make of that added comma-pause, followed by the indecisive ‘once’?
The cottage is said to be a ‘place of rest’ and indeed there is wine, food, companionship; a sense of the carefree that dissolve the speaker’s ‘anxieties’, ‘fears’ and ‘the dread of being alone’ so we have a sense of it as a haven, a salve or balm – perhaps against the friction cause by the speed and danger of the twenty-first century as we hurtle down the highway of our lives. The cottage, then, becomes a symbol for pausing, as well as all those other aspects we might associate with the idea of a cottage more generally.
The statement ‘I think’ then transforms into one of belief, so that part of the poem may coalesce into the following interpretation:
To have survived the highway of life thus far, with all its loud and frightening, high-octane inevitability, I must surely, at some point, have come to rest; to pause in a place where time, victuals and friendship were mine. And I, who have hurried and hustled through time and space, did, in that moment, witness the stiller forms of the world, touched their cold waters which were enough, were sufficient in what they offered, to sink beneath the surface, to be ‘happy-sad, if not happy-happy’ (p. 10).
Other interpretations undoubtedly abound. The dreaminess, uncertainty and ambiguity offer all kinds of readings and many of Webb’s poems require care and attention to grasp at meaning. Nonetheless, plenty of the poems have a fank, intense, personal, open-hearted honesty – a vulnerability even – that is explicitly but delicately delivered.
Raw honesty and heart-squeeze is most notably found in the poems ‘On Waking’, ‘With My Mother at the Cattle Market Car Boot’ and ‘On Visiting My Father’s Grave’. These poems cut the skin, carefully and deliberately. If a poetry collection as a whole is like river, then these poems add to the water’s speed and its depth. It is impossible not to be swept along the intense currents of each poem.
Webb also displays a skill at the arresting opening and ending of a poem.
‘I wonder what it is you think is missing
From your life, that might be found here
In the misty rain,’ (p.54)
opens ‘With My Mother at the Cattle Market Car Boot’, while ‘On Visiting My Father’s Grave’ concludes by wondering what the speaker’s father might say
‘After so long? Perhaps only to ask
For a little understanding,
A little reassurance, just like the living.’ (p.57)
Counterbalancing these poems are the four ‘Incantations’, which begin and end Parts I and III, all of them similarly titled (‘Incantation to the Stone God’). Frankly, these were difficult to understand, whether read in order, separately, or as a piece. The first two lines of the initial incantation also bordered on the kind of poetry I confess to finding frustratingly incomprehensible almost to the point of laughter:
‘Finger of stone. Intestines of stone.
The eye and the eyelash of stone.’
It does effectively evoke the idea of prayer, ancient spell, old gods. And the poem is rescued by a powerful, impressive rhythm and repetition that lends a degree of gravitas and religious intensity. Despite this, whether it’s attacking the stone god, being dazed by it in a dream, or feeding it strawberries, these poems left me agnostic at best although I expect for the many who are more widely read or more familiar with this island’s Celtic origins, paganism, monoliths and such-like, this quartet might sing with significance.
The most mature poetry, I posit, can be found in Webb’s longer, observational poems, In particular, ‘At Wych Elm Fields’ and ‘After a Dream by the Banks of the River Frome’ offer a long, level look and at Gypsy / Roma / Traveller sites and generations of local families in Frome respectively. Other poems like ‘Operation Galileo’, ‘Hunter’s Farm’, ‘The Prophecy of Old Bull’ and ‘Geraldine’s Horseland’ help people the region and give the collection a strong parallel to Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Often, indeed, there’s a plainness of language and an emphasis on marginalized communities and people’ thankfully, there is far less romanticizing of the countryside than the poet’s predecessors might be accused of and equally fortunate is the absence of sentimentality or patronisation.
Taken as a whole, Highway Cottage is a brilliant poetry collection that is relatively simple in its language but complex in its use, in its ambiguities, uncertainties and symbols. It stretches from the impersonal to the intensely personal, strongly leans into the rural, blending interior and exterior, memory, dream, the past and the present, as well as aspects of the political. The poems tend toward the shorter side, although the longest is some six or seven pages in length. There are wonderful lines and phrases throughout – ‘the despotism of indecision’ (‘Highway Cottage’); ‘sun-dried river syrup’ (‘After a Dream By the Banks of the River Frome’); ‘the violent cosiness of the stars’ (‘Way Back West’). There is, I think, a poem for any reader in this collection – and yet, despite its breadth, it very much hangs together as a complete work and by the end, we realize we have joined the poet on his journey; for a time we have paused, rested, spent some hours recuperating at Highway Cottage. And though we may not feel Happy-Happy by its end (despite the many dreams, there is too much reality here, as in life itself) we leave with a sense of being Happy-Sad. To read Ralf Webb’s Highway Cottage is to be moved; at times, deeply so. What more can we ask of a poet and their work?
Poetry review by r.m.d.