These are spare, sharply focused poems written with great assurance and control and an often miraculous clarity, such intent observation that they seem, in Lamb’s phrase, to resolve themselves into the element which they contemplate, an immersion made explicit in the title poem, ‘so true I can’t tell/ whether I or the wind speaks it’. All the senses are on the alert: we smell ‘the barn’s mousy, pigeony dark’, hear ‘each bird singing konk-la-ree’, feel ‘the first/ fat plops of rain’ and the heather ‘poor as a mattress/ for walking’ under our feet.

More is going on than responses to landscape. Or rather, these responses are shaped by underlying tensions, recurring themes of intimacy and unease, the narrative of a relationship, alluded to, never fully explained. The ‘ratty hems’ of willows and ‘a sky of cheap beer’ reflect a period of depression. ‘The sound of hearing so little/ Of the true sound of this place’ makes us aware of the limitations of human experience. Set against such perceptions are moments of intense happiness: ‘One gull/ sails/ through the morning – a bright flake of halo’, ‘this brown-smelling joy, scarcely to be believed.’ This is a poet acutely, almost unbearably alive.