chickenfeet

I'm reading Edmund Blunden's Cricket Country. It satisfies two of life's quieter pleasures; reading a skilled writer writing about cricket and reimagining the English countryside. The pastoral nature of Blunden's verse is of course well known, perhaps even notorious, but this essential ruralness infuses everything he wrote. There is room for the mud of a Flanders trench in Blunden's work but one feels he couldn't have imagined Canary Wharf or the M25. In Cricket Country, as in Undertones of War (surely the most poetic of the WWI memoirs by poets) one senses strongly that while life is transitory, some things; the annual cycle of the countryside and the cricket season, are eternal.