Modern Pastoral Poets

'young and easy'

'green' and 'golden' repetition

'green and carefree'

'time let me play... golden in the mercy of his means'

'green and golden'

'it was Adam and maiden'

'lamb white days'

'green and dying'

'sang in my chains'

'heaven', 'priested', 'prayed'

'seagull', 'white horses', 'larks'

'gates of the town closed as the town awoke'

'spring', 'springful', 'summertime'

'rain wringing'

'dwindling harbour, 'pale rain', 'wet church'

'the weather turned around'

'the mystery sang alive'

'true joy of a long dead child'

'o may my heart's truth still be sung'

'bead-stalls, balloon-men, a Bank'

'kids scrap, freed' from their 'owners'

'extrusions of earth'

'a recession of skills'

'all worthy, all well done, but less than the honeycombs'

'bound for far-off farms'

'empty at dusk'

'back now... to their local lives'

'dies back into the area of work'

'breaks ancestrally each year into regenerate union'

'I thought it would last my time'

'there would always be fields and farms'

'old part retreats'

'bleak high-risers'

'we could always escape in the car'

'earth will always respond'

'chuck filth in the sea'

'but what do I feel now? Doubt? Or age, simply?'

'unspoilt dales'

'bricked in', 'slum', 'garbage'

'that will be England gone'

'I just think it will happen, soon'

'another church'

'brownish now'

'musty', 'silence', 'dark'

'awkward reverence'

'reflect the place was not worth stopping for'

'yet stop I did; in fact I often do'

'a few cathedrals chronically on show'

'seek this place for what it was'

''shell'

'gravitating... to this ground'

'Eden'

'no one tempting me to make the badchoice'

'threat', 'mocked', 'sickness'

'everything was too neat;

'sickness for Eden was so strong'

'there was no sign that anything had ended'

'thoughtless birds'

'singing an ecstacy I could not share'

'thoughtless', 'cunning', 'pain'

'ecstacy', 'pleasures', 'gentleness'

'made your absence seem a savage force'

'dismantle the landscape'

'dismantle', 'stripped', 'empty'

'the river can stay, but loses its stubby fringe of willows'

'a sky like ours'

'an earth stripped of its future'

stones 'are the most permanent presences here'

'hold', 'chain'

'listen to the past's long pulse'

'slow dream of winter'

'strange knowledge'

'light of the tomb'

'initiation of the marrow'

'heart of darkness'

'holystoned the presence of potatoes'

'we read the future in these entrails'

'darkness', 'fall', 'sacrificed'

'sepia hush'

'Persephone's fruits utter where they have been, where we are going'

'I remember this place'

'conspiratorial presence of trees'

'I remember this place and before'

'trees and grass waiting to take over'

'I remember before and I remember the not-yet after'

'mute persistence of water'

'humanity goes out like a light'

'foreign and broken'

'gutted', 'ashes', 'hollow'

'spilled blood'

'dyeing the immaculate rivers'

'noisy tractor', 'machine'

'you cannot live in the present, at least not in Wales'

'the language... strange to the ear'

'there is no present in Wales, and no future'

'relics', 'towers', 'castles'

'impotent people'

'sick with imbreeding'

'worrying the carcass of an old song'

'bald Welsh hills', 'gaunt sky', 'crude earth'

'half-witted grin'

'spittled mirth'

'there is something frightning in the vacancy of his mind'

'sour with years of sweat'

'siege', 'attrition', 'fortress', 'stormed'

'remember him'

'enduring like a tree under the curious stars'

'leads nowhere and fails at the top'

'eaten away'

'long erosion of the green tide'

'creeping perpetually nearer'

'last outpost of time past'

'slow axis'

'I don't know what you are talking about'

'your thoughts flow too swiftly for me'

'crude', 'exposed', 'sharp'

'I am alone, exposed in my own fields'

'cold winds of the world blowing'

'the patched gate you left open will never be shut again'