Finzi's Orchard

There is special power in an adoptive landscape,

Unsmudged by ties of birth or ancestry,

Unburnished by false childhood memory.

Hampshire downland: Church Farm, Ashmansworth.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is what I have always longed for.’

Not meaning, I think, anything as easy

As an edenic ideal, but rather the place

To do what he did best: to cultivate

Rare apple trees, collect rare poets, write

An English music – more than English because

His outsider's eye and ear have given it

Such frail disenchantment, such haunted repose.

Shakespeare, Milton, Traherne, Wordsworth, Hardy:

Their words are kerned, finding new edges,

New spaces between them, and new purity

Of diction. There is fresh wind in the trees;

A russet windfall nestles in the grass;

The russet clarinet rests on its bed of strings.

NEIL POWELL