[A fellow of England's Royal Society of Literature, Stanford is an English educator, poet, and critic who has frequently written about Muriel Spark, Christopher Fry, and Emily and Anne Brontë. In the review below, he offers praise for Lee's Selected Poems, noting the volume's nostalgic tone and subject matter.]

Some of the purest poetry of sensuous perception that has been written this century comes from the pen of Laurie Lee whose Selected Poems are a pot-pourri of intense, yet almost antiquated, sweetness.

It is more detailed, less fantasticated, than the world of childhood which Dylan Thomas created in 'Fern Hill'. Thomas' was a retrospective vision (with all the nostalgia [of] time's passing occasions). Mr Lee, at his happiest, creates a sort of perennial immediacy—though it is one of myth fed by the present rather than realism, raw, refined or simple. Thus, he writes of the 'Village of Winter Carols':

       Village of winter carols
       and gaudy spinning tops,
       of green-handed walnuts
       and games in the moon.

Nostalgia is stated in a Foreword in which the poet tells us that these verses were "written by someone I once was and who is so distant to me now that I scarcely recognize him any more."

There is little here I can fault, though I do not like the italicised archaism in the second line—

       Fish and small birds
       do strike with diamond mouths

—which I would re-write "strike with their diamond mouths."

Most of the Imagist Movement poems dealt with urban or literary themes. I like to think of the spirits of Aldington, Flint and H.D. contemplating their rural inheritor.