A collection of literary essays.

In a Roman fort in Wales at the turn of the sixth century, Porius, the son of a reigning prince, is aided by Merlin the magician, Nineue, and Medrawd in a battle for cultural survival.

Earth Memories is a wonderful collection of essays by the English writer Llewelyn Powys. These ‘love letters to the English Countryside’ manifest throughout great depth of nature lore and observation hand in hand with the author’s own personal pagan creed and commentary on places, people and things. This edition, which was first published in 1938, includes an Introduction by the American literary critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Van Wyck Brooks. “Wherever Llewelyn Powys has lived, his mind has always turned towards England, the homeland that haunts him like a passion. Under the stars in the African jungle, poring over Robert Burton, whose rhythms have left long traces in his style—a style that is often archaic and always rare in texture—he dreamed of English gardens. In New York, in the clattering streets, he would see the cuckoo perched singing on the top of Sandsfoot Castle. He can always regain serenity, he says in one of his essays, by thinking of the playground of his childhood, the pear trees of Montacute Vicarage. High as his fever may be, the memory of this enchanted ground quiets his pulse in a moment; and his pictures of England suggest the eye of the convalescent, as if the world had been reborn for him. They are full of an all but miraculous freshness.”—Van Wyck Brooks, Introduction

Drawing on his own vivid childhood memories of the seaside town of Weymouth, Powys creates a striking collection of human oddities, through which he shows his deep sympathy for the variety, eccentricity and loneliness of human beings.

'I have tried to write my life as if I were confessing to a priest, a philosopher, and a wise old woman. I have tried to write as if I were going to be executed when it was finished. I have tried to write it as if I were both God and Devil.' One is tempted to say only John Cowper Powys could have written that, and, beyond doubt, only John Cowper Powys could have written the idiosyncratic and spellbinding work we have here. Yes, he was influenced by Yeats and Rousseau, especially the latter's Confessions, but there is no other work quite like this. It seems almost too pedestrian to say it covers the first sixty years of his life (he lived for another thirty years) and to say anything about them, as J. B. Priestley memorably put it, 'would be like turning on a tap before introducing people to Niagara Falls.' J. B. Priestley also said 'It is a book which can be read, with pleasure and profit, over and over again. It is in fact one of the greatest autobiographies in the English language. Even if Powys had never written any novels, this one book alone would have proved him to be a writer of genius.'