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This is a gathering of Crossley-Holland’s East Anglian poems from seven volumes, plus five new poems: a beautiful book, both inside and out.

     He celebrates traditional things, childhood, fatherhood, family and the prehistorical, but the weirdness in them doesn’t escape him. In ‘Chinese Boxes’ a Suffolk woman reports on the reappearance of her dead lover after seventeen years:

…Sometimes now I see him
trampling the camomile,

and leaning on the stack
of bruised packing cases
in the oily garage…

…I was still married then

and not quite a widow.
Tom did take time to die,
and most old husbands do...

     He has a ‘way to stare in the world’s eye’ - with a pun on pupil: ‘the pupil of now’. Watching waves, he finds the images for the psychic muse:

...a man draws and redraws the crescent contours
of the salt-woman he loves to draw to love.

He leaves you with a feeling of deliberate mystery. Whom is he talking about in ‘Across the Water’?:

In the end he did not leave us
but we rowed away downstream.
My little daughter crouched in the stern
and kept on asking...
...Over the immense
purple tide we saw him leaning back
and staring up his neck shining.
He could not hear us calling out
across the water, and my daughter stood
up. Each time we waved he waved.

It’s a reminder: what we know about the world is negligible. We’re lost if we think we know what anything is.

     Crossley-Holland is noted for his feeling for the marshlands of the North Norfolk coast, but also Suffolk, and the ancient behaviour of man and land with each other. He’s equally noted for his relish of the anglo-Saxon roots of the language and his sensuous manipulation of vowels and consonants. These are poems to taste with the tongue and eye of the mind. If you can’t live in East Anglia this is almost as good.