Hawker

by Robert Peters

'Hawker' was awarded the Poetry Society of America's Alice Faye di Castagnola Prize. Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875) was Vicar of Morwenstowe in Cornwall, England. He lived for over forty years in a wild and desolate parish near the high jagged cliffs of north Cornwall, a coast noted for its shipwrecks. Hawker, poet, essayist and author of the song 'Trelawny', the unofficial Cornish national anthem, was obsessed with rescuing drowned sailors. He dressed eccentrically, claimed to believe in mermaids and demons, took opium in later life, and left a body of writing and legend behind him from which Peters has drawn one of his unique "voice portraits." "Eccentric Cornish vicar Hawker has found an ideal biographer in Peters, whose tough-tender 'voice portrait' eloquently captures the eloquent mind of this forgotten poet and essayist" --Library Journal