Penguin Modern Poets 3: George Barker, Martin Bell, Charles Causley

Charles Causley is a poet who tends to come with epithets like "much-loved" — he was never a heavyweight Nobel-track intellectual, but he had a big popular following and probably counts as the most respected of the generation of British poets that emerged around the end of World War II. He wrote a lot of poetry for children, and he became a familiar voice on the radio, both of which must account for a good deal of his popularity, whilst his Cornish, working-class, war veteran background was something people found easy to identify with at the time. But, crucially, he also had the gift of expressing complex ideas in deceptively simple language (and making it rhyme!).

The selection of Causley in PMP3 includes must of his best-known early show more poems, such as the unforgettable "Timothy Winters", a poem you feel should be hanging on the wall of every social-worker dealing with child poverty, the enigmatic sonnet "The prisoners of love" ("The prisoners rise and rinse their skies of stone / But in their jailers' eyes they meet their own"), the ever-quotable "The seasons in North Cornwall" and the gloriously tricky "Nursery rhyme of innocence and experience". All wonderful, and at least a little bit perplexing.

On this re-reading I was also stopped in my tracks by "At the grave of John Clare", which must date from Causley's time training as a teacher in Peterborough, where he imagines Clare walking "With one foot in the furrow" and "the poetry bursting like a diamond bomb". Quite. show less