The dawn chorus is a mighty paradox for a country-loving insomniac. It’s four o’clock or five o’clock or some other unearthly hour, and you awaken in panic: it’s those bloody birds again. ‘The chickens woke me up,’ objected Zoe, my eldest grandchild, when she first slept here as a small child. The birds clatter with size eleven feet on the roof above my bed and whoosh with cymbal-like wings across the palely dawning sky.

I came to this part of England 25 years ago and put down unexpected roots. I am a town child, born near Paddington Station, raised in a block of flats a few miles west of there, and then in the Blue Plaque House. I’d always lived in a town: the noise and the pace and the crowds are built into my identity. But I did have, from early on, that other experience of the countryside: nothing especially wild, just the placid green undulations of Bedfordshire, where my father’s parents and their ancestors lived their now-unknowable and probably quite unremarkable lives. There’s nothing remarkable about the countryside – it’s just here, this land, with its effervescent birds; it isn’t at all pretentious. This, where I am now, isn’t pretty-pretty tourist England, just ordinary trees and fields and hedges and lanes and medieval churches with comfortably leaning gravestones. It makes me think of Kathleen Raine’s poem ‘Vegetation’ which opens ‘O never harm the dreaming world,/the world of green, the world of leaves’.

Love & solitude is the title of a set of poems composed by the Swedish-speaking Finnish writer Edith Södergran. She wrote her poetry first in German, French and Russian, before turning to her native Swedish and becoming the first Scandinavian modernist poet. For this she was ridiculed in her lifetime, a reputation since reversed. Södergran contracted tuberculosis from her father when she was 16 and died of it 15 years later in 1923. Her poetry was written against a backdrop of illness, poverty, failed love affairs and war – the 1917 Russian Revolution cut off her family’s financial support, and the Finnish civil war brought fighting and near starvation. The poems are uncompromising, lyrical and biting at the same time. There is a keen sense of resilience in a landscape of harsh inequality: ‘You looked for a flower/and found a fruit./You looked for a well/and found a sea.