Forget for a moment what you know about books and their covers, and consider Faber’s latest anthology with a judicious eye. From the heavy, silky card to the tasteful artwork and the title font’s restrained serif, it’s a masterclass in elegant, unthreatening nostalgia. The illustration (stamped straight on to the boards: no fiddly dust jacket here) is a thing of seemly beauty: a linocut of a spare winter landscape of low hills and bare black trees, richly lit by a brace of pheasants and a spray of red rose hips. We know it’s a British landscape (frankly, we suspect it’s an English one) thanks to the subtitle’s adroit deployment of “the Nation”, and the sense of cosy patriotism is amplified by a discreet tagline in the top-left corner which informs us that the poems are “as heard on Radio 4’s Poetry Please”. This is a book intended for the Christmas market – the what-to-buy-your-aunt-who-likes-poetry market – and the cover does a superb job of reassuring us that nothing contained within it is likely to scare the horses.
The poems themselves make good on the cover’s promise. Nature poems are reassuring by – well, by their nature: for most of us, they are the first poems we encounter (I have vivid memories of making a wall display of Walter de la Mare’s “Silver” with a bunch of other eight-year-olds for our school hall), and we absorb them before anyone has had a chance to explain that, actually, poetry is difficult and impenetrable and not to be trusted. We carry the idea into adulthood that nature is an appropriate subject for poetry, and classroom staples such as “Adlestrop” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” (both included here) soothe us with their familiarity. And if nature poems are reassuring, poems on the seasons are doubly so. No matter what’s happening in your life, there’s comfort to be derived from observing the ebb and flow of spring’s slow swelling and autumn’s gaudy decline; from the reminder that time is cyclical as well as linear, and that change itself is changeless.
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