Berkshire

A road here will run straight for miles; then breakits back around half-a-dozen corners

bent to recognise some mediæval pattern in the landor a village common skirted by week-ending city typesor, occasionally, played on by very small children:

plain land does not welcome hyperbole,Damon’s pastoral glees are disavowed

by this prosey distribution of oak and elm and beech.

Not emphatic enough to give forestsfor crones or keepers to tell tales about,

nor intimate enough for rural arbour or lovers’ glade:the really big cultural noises have all been made elsewhere,where the sun’s insistence on time was a bit more pushy,

where crags could impose a solitude thatneeded straight answers, or a city slum

bred vermin that no gazing at a landscape would dispel.

In nasty landscapes saints meet martyrdomor clanking heroes gallop dragon-ward;

pious myths and epic derring-do don’t last five minutes here.A land that knows man too well to expect very much of him,an adequate way of filling the space under the sky,

a bourgeois compromise, without resortto melodramatic scarp or sheer cliff,

without the nervousness that comes from lakes and rocky holes.

Yet, following the tidy furrows roundobstacles just too much trouble to shift,

and watching these big, roomy fields slowly opening intomodest horizons, we are assured of what is really there:behind deathless tough-guys, tireless paramours, flawless saints

are our unusual selves: this middle groundde-bunks our silly longing for extremes:

in the end, it is ordinary things that are permanent.

CHRIS BROOKS