A farmer-turned-poet has had her first collection published.

She celebrated the publication of A Pease Myers Pastoral this week at the Pele Tower in Corbridge.

Liz Haynes, who lives in Weardale, combined teaching with helping out on her partner’s family farm for many years before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Liz HaynesLiz Haynes (Image: Supplied) She said: "I hadn’t written poetry before but discovered that it can capture what it is like living on a hill farm perfectly. I’m trying to explore the conflict between the beauty of where I live and work and the relentless struggle of farming here. There are not many farmer poets out there and I decided I was going to be one.

"Farming is tough and maybe because I am not from a farming background I have sometimes found it a struggle. Looking at it all from a writer’s viewpoint has really helped me," she said.

Poet Jacob Polley and professor at Newcastle University said: "Rooted in both the physical and emotional experience of farming, these poems are chiselled, understated, musically and movingly alert. Liz Haynes has written a fierce meditation on the ways a landscape is physically worked and worked into words. This is a gripping debut."

Fellow poet and professor Bill Herbert said: “It is as though a series of carefully composed camera angles have been set up, then the action of the farm has simply been allowed to unfold but this is to overlook the artful juxtapositions of strange Stein-like prose and the Hughesian capacity to see both grim reality and something uncanny not beyond it, but embodied by it."

Liz added: "Obviously, I have enjoyed the whole process of learning about writing poetry but I really wanted to put my view across of the harsh reality of life on a farm. I don’t think the public have any idea – I certainly didn’t before I fell in love with a farmer and moved to one."

It’s not all doom and gloom though. A Pease Myers Pastoral, which launched on November 18, is full of gorgeous photographs and captures the beauty and magical qualities of the North Pennines landscape.

Copies are available from the Caldew Press website www.caldewpress.com and Liz directly. Contact her via Instagram @pease_myers_farm.