The English Woods
The English woods are naked. Trees stand lifeless; once blazing hair Rots scab brown and weeping at their feet.
Yet dead leaves, like embers, glow And inside hide a phoenix.
Stoked bushes and snaking spaniel’s breath Ignite a feathered flame, And bursting like a grenadier’s gift A fire-spat pheasant flies!
As if combusted, with klaxon cough, The cock curls out, a dragon youth, Wind-whipped tail streaming And collapses before the crack! that slays it.
Good shooting! shout brave George’s sons To celebrate his victory.
In English ritual, to toast their saint, They slaughter his victim’s children And hang them on a peg.
Though the fiction is light, the abundance of field names confuses and the nostalgia is thickly laid, it is a book of great charm. I commend the many simple and effective observations of childhood moments accompanying her father to church, eating brown sugar sandwiches, or hiding in a stook at harvest — ‘a perfect tent-like space with the sharp stubble as a floor’. Readers over a certain age brought up in the country will find much to recognise and enjoy. ‘The land was a sacred thing’ in those days.
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