Description

A landmark collection of poems from the author of Cider with Rosie

Laurie Lee is beloved for his writing on a lost rural world. His evocative poetry springs from his deep connection with nature, as he tracks the seasons changing and the years turning over. Yet Lee’s poems also captured war, human relationships and distant places, informed by his own experiences of lives uprooted by change and conflict. Written during the course of his lifetime, the verses brought together in Collected Poems range over Lee playing his fiddle in a Spanish town; ecstatic in springtime of his beloved Slad valley; or digging for faith in the depths of winter.

Gathered in one volume for the first time, and including a generous selection of previously unseen verses from Lee’s archives, these timeless, poignant poems show him expressing the essence of life, love and loss.

Publisher Review

PRAISE FOR DOWN IN THE VALLEY: It is a fine thing to revisit this writer’s landscape and hear his amiable voice in it again. * Times Literary Supplement * A beautiful illustration of how, in some way, we are all indelibly influenced by the landscape of our childhood. — Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path