Description
This is a mighty book of Norths: northern geographies, histories, lights; a place of definition, frost and cold. There is an unfaltering Recusant spirit about these poems, a survival through defeat and a sense of underlying permanences.
Each poem has an occasion: some of the occasions are personal meetings, conversations, which unlock shared scenes and themes; some are historical in origin, their past often one of early Christian faith or religious conflict. The poems abound in art, in specific lived detail, particulars of landscape, and in a harsh weather which is not unlike time itself in its effect on the living and ageing imagination. Each poem requires a different metre, a different pace; each form is carefully attuned to its occasion.
The Map and the Clock: A Laureate's Choice of the Poetry of Britain and Ireland 
Dog Poems 
Hansel and Gretel 
Let Us Compare Mythologies 
This Is Yarrow 
Milk and Honey 
Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith 
The Art of Scratching 
The Lover's Pinch 
Bridge 116 
A Monkey At the Window 
Swansea Automatic 
Somewhere Else Entirely 
All Aboard the London Bus 
The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear 
Poems 
River Lane