There is something richly circumstantial about Alison Brackenbury's poems: they are often rooted in a rural world, or in townscapes which sustain communities and preserve a strong sense of their history and what it gives them. "Thorpeness" has delic...

Alison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares, and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's "Selected Poems" begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behin...

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...

"Then" draws on Alison Brackenbury's lifetime's experience of rural England, its people and its ways, and the threats to its survival. From the lapwings of her childhood Lincolnshire to the recurrent floods in Gloucestershire, where she has lived for...

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...

Ballads are memorable. This book was finished when the poet was fifty, with too much to remember: the shadows of the greater world, the bulldozers down the street tearing through a Victorian school, the generosity of its founders, its green graceful...

In 1829, Alison Brackenbury's first collection for seven years, the poet travels to three continents: there are poems from her Asian, African and European journeys, and the different peopled landscapes that she visits are evoked with her resonant lig...