Chatto & Windus will be publishing a new collection of poems called Marston Meadows in November 2025. Here is the title poem, as an appetiser:

Marston Meadows

A Corona for Prue

            1.

Come, then, we’ll walk (what else is there to do?)
Down to the goosey river, where the weir
Sprawls like our dreams and seethes throughout the year
Into the secret fields. Just me and you
Tracking the shape and startled peekaboo
Of a lost roe deer (surprised to find us near
But fixed in curiosity, not fear).
These are the meadows, and our rendezvous.


It seems an age since the retreat of March,
Its caution and alarm. Then we were shocked
By graphs in April and the great delay
Through weeks that reached like columns of an arch
That rises into mist, our vision locked
In the uncertainties of dangerous May.

            2.
In the uncertainties of dangerous May
Arrives this sense of yielding and of stasis.
It’s the new sun that does it. It outfaces
All of our nightmares with its brilliant day.
It wins its endless quarrel with the grey,
Touching with colour all the roses’ faces.
It brings the beetles from their hiding-places
And all the beasts into their sexual play.

And now the joggers splutter round the Parks
Like frantic surgeons. Sounds of silence bring
Some kinds of paranoia: far away
Meaningless bells, unusual meadowlarks,
With all the threats and terror of the Spring,
And Summer coming into disarray.

            3.
And Summer coming into disarray
Reminds us of our earlier expectations,
With all the flowers stalwart at their stations
And blossom heavy on the branch’s sway;
Magnolia’s cold flames that straightaway,
It seems, curdle the lawns; the celebrations
Of lilac and wisteria; the patience
Of irises that line the waterway.

All come and go as always, and short June
Yields to that month that we possess, that knot
We tied a diamond time ago, the new
Life that we made, early but not too soon,
Now more than ever sharply aware of what
We see before us underneath the blue.

            4.
We see before us underneath the blue
A civil landscape more or less undefiled,
Peaceful, with seated cows, but hardly wild.
We tread a fluid map the centuries grew.
Each ancient boundary’s a parvenu:
Villages suburbs, old mills reconciled
With the cool walks of Addison and Wilde
Where knowledge has its hopeful vistas, too.

And all the time a steady watercourse,
That brims and floods when opportunity
Allows, confines the paths we wander through.
We need no maps (they never show a horse
Or darkening cloud) and only hope to see
The ancient green world that we thought we knew.

            5.
The ancient green world that we thought we knew
Seems always fresh. We are the audience
With privileged private seats at an immense
Performance in rehearsal, always new
And yet familiar. It’s nature who
Produces this perennial, intense
Theatre of burgeoning magnificence,
This symphony of green, this pulsing zoo.

That world is both itself and what we are
And always have been since the earliest slime
Began to stir, or Yahweh moulded clay.
It rightly tells us mind is molecular
And we are bodies. Yes, and every time
It moves us still, whatever we may say.

            6.
It moves us still! Whatever we may say
When taking pride in what we think we think,
When rationalising things or pushing ink,
It welcomes us when we have gone astray
And look on all our works with blank dismay.
We press a button to pursue a link
Which merely tells us our horizons shrink:
Our wild aim kills us with its ricochet.

A field is like a room without a ceiling,
Hedges for walls and gates for doors. It’s hateful
To think we can’t go in. But it’s okay,
Since nature is a host of sorts. So feeling
Like guests we tell ourselves that we are grateful
That it accepts us. Though it will not stay.

            7.
That it accepts us, though it will not stay
For long enough to nurse us as it did,
May just about content us. God forbid
That we rebuke it for our sins. Today
A virus breeds and there’s a price to pay.
Our Government is like an invalid
Running a nursing home. The rich, amid
Their funds and islands, try to run away.

No one can hide. We make our sacrifices
As though we can appease the gods we’ve cursed
While reasoning away each old taboo.
But they have left us to our own devices,
Left us with prejudices that we’ve nursed
For long enough to be a settled view.

            8.
For long enough to be a settled view
The meadows (rooms we enter through a wall)
Need to be visited so we can learn to call
Them by their names, or give them names anew:
Like Music Meadow, where muntjac pursue
Each other; Great Mill Pond Mead where grass grows tall
Enough to hide a single deer; and all
Of Napper’s Arable where moles review
The sky in punctuation marks of earth;
The buttercups in South Mead; ganders in
Bat Willow Meadow refining their fashion show;
The field near Park Farm where a doe gave birth.
They all define the routes where we have been.
Onwards has always been the way to go.

            9.
Onwards has always been the way to go.
We can’t relive the future or the past,
Only create the present, which moves fast
Upon itself, the way a river’s flow
Defeats the expectant eye when to-and-fro
The birds behave in it. They have this vast
Assumption that the river’s made to last.
Their liquid landscape is a status quo.

Another lesson from the birds, who pair
And sing about it. What is the blackbird at?
We know he has no language for goodbye.
His song-sheet says the Spring’s eternal. Dare
We share with him the frail illusion that
Together we might make time stop or fly?

            10.
Together we might make time stop. Or fly
Like a pair of sailing swans quite unconfined
By their mortality, rising entwined
And abstract as a page of heraldry,
Where to make meaning is to simplify
All the dire contraries of humankind.
In such a flight we could become all mind,
The once-and-for-all of every by-and-by.

But human minds are weak and fully-freighted
With all the noise of living. Nothing’s clear-cut,
No revelation but a lexicon
Of possibilities. The time’s awaited
When our joint mind must be divided, but
When we are parted we shall think as one.

            11.
When we are parted we shall think as one
Who lost a fortune, though a billionaire.
Our years, profuse in quantity, though rare
Enough, amount to sixty. They have run
Like water through our hands, though. Not yet done,
Solid as earth, mercurial as air
Or fire. There is no reason to despair,
But let us gamble still on sixty-one.

The earth bears diamond as the air does birds,
(Tears of the gods, the Romans thought) congealed
From molten carbon billions of years ago.
Diamond is hard, but not so hard as words
We speak or write that say that we must yield
Without complaint, if matter tells us so.

            12.
Without complaint, if matter tells us—so
We must believe it, without a tear or frown.
The die is cast, and we can always drown
Our sorrows in Scrabble or an old Bordeaux.
This day is precious to us both, although
I have no diamonds for you, only this crown
Of sonnets, a rococo hand-me-down
You’ll say, and just another jeu de mots.

Remember Evelyn’s terrace, trying to quiz
His motto: TO KALON KATEXETE? Two years
Ago, your birthday? Some Greek that took our eye. 
It said the Beautiful is all there is
And we must seize it, though it disappears.
And that’s just why we can’t agree to die.

            13.
And that’s just why we can’t agree. To die
First is the cruellest choice. Die second? Hard
Enough, and anyway such choice is barred
However we might think to justify 
The preference. And even should you try,
You cannot cut the pack and choose a card.
Death has a way of catching you off-guard.
It comes at last out of a clear blue sky.

And that is what we have this Summer, when
The leaves are lofting in a kind of praise,
A choir of chlorophyll in unison,
Making a shade by growing thick, and then
Dappling the paths and filtering the rays,
So we may wander here beneath the sun.

            14.
So, we may wander here. Beneath the sun
We circle and return from whence we came.
The place that we come back to is the same,
Though hours nearer to our oblivion.
A walk is like a knot that gets undone,
And yet it keeps us closer. We can claim 
Each minute was invested in our name,
A dividend from all that we’ve begun,
A time to spend that may not come again.
When the dry August turns to dank September
We may be seeking answers to the clue
That time proposes, that we’ve looked in vain
For all these years. Perhaps we won’t remember.
Come then. We’ll walk. What else is there to do?

            15.
Come then, we’ll walk. What else is there to do
In the uncertainties of dangerous May
And Summer coming into disarray?
We see before us underneath the blue
The ancient green world that we thought we knew.
It moves us still, whatever we may say,
And it accepts us. Though it will not stay
For long enough to be a settled view.

Onwards has always been the way to go.
Together we might make time stop or fly.
When we are parted we shall think as one
Without complaint, if matter tells us so.
And that’s just why we can’t agree to die—
So we can wander here beneath the sun.

A Rack Press Broadside, How Many Children?, was published in December 2024 (rackpresspoetry@btinternet.com).

St Francis of Assisi, a cantata written with the composer Bryan Kelly in 1981, has been issued by Regent Records Ltd (REGCD585) in 2024 in a performance by the Chapel Choir of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and the Britten Sinfonia.

A few copies of the September 1983 reprint of Flying to Nowhere have been discovered. It is in all physical respects identical to the first edition, with the high production values of Tom Fenton’s Salamander Press. £10 including postage from 4 Benson Place, Oxford OX2 6QH.