The beauty of the Goucestershire landscape and sky-scape are Alison Brackenbury's commanding theme, her landscapes are historied, the skies always in vivid motion, moving towards elegy. The two World Wars and their poets are present, but also the nea...

Alison Brackenbury's ballads for the modern world sing with a truth and directness that reach back through Edward Thomas and John Clare to the English folk-tradition itself. There are poems about birds and animals, the ancient rhythms of weather, lan...