William Barnes (1801-1886) was a prolific writer of poems both in the standard English of his day (which he was wont to call "book English") and in the local dialect of his own childhood. He published three volumes of dialect poems describing and celebrating the rural life he had known as a boy in Dorset's Blackmore Vale, and gave immensely popular readings from them, in the dialect, to audiences who flocked from miles around (as his daughter Lucy tells us in her biography of her father) to hear their own feelings, language and daily life portrayed in their own common speech. Barnes's poetic brilliance has always been recognized by his fellow poets: Thomas Hardy (to whom he was a mentor) was one of his strongest supporters, and wrote a poem for his funeral; Tennyson went to visit him, and afterwards wrote half a dozen poems in his own Lincolnshire dialect in Barnes's honour. In our own day Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, and Sir Christopher Ricks, former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, are amongst his most devoted followers. In this one-hour reading of selected poems from Barnes's second collection of "Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect" Tom Burton and friends bring these masterpieces to life, in their original nineteenth-century Blackmore Vale pronunciation, with all their merriment, their pathos, and their poignancy. Proceeds from this event will be donated to Alzheimer's Australia and the Barr Smith Library.

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