High and Low: Poems

CONTENTS: Preface; LANDSCAPES: Cornish Cliffs; Tregardock; By the Ninth Green, St Enodoc; Winter Seascape; Old Friends; A Bay in Anglesey; A Lament for Moira McCavendish; The Small Towns of Ireland; Ireland's Own; Great Central Railway; Matlock Bath; An Edwardian Sunday, Broomhill, Sheffield; Lines Written to Martyn Skinner; Uffington; PORTRAITS: Anglo-Catholic Congresses; In Willesden Courtyard; The Commander; Autumn 1964; The Hon. Sec.; Monody on the Death of a Platonist Bank Clerk; Good-bye; Five o'Clock Shadow; LIGHT AND DARK: A Russell Flint; Perp. Revival i' the North; Agricultural Caress; Narcissus; The Cockney Amorist; Harvest Hymn; Meditation on the A30; Inexpensive Progress; Mortality; PERSONAL: Reproof Deserved; Caprice; Cricket Master. "Sir John Betjeman CBE (28 August 1906 - 19 May 1984) was an English poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a 'poet and hack'. He was born to a middle-class family in Edwardian London. Although he claimed he failed his degree at Oxford University, his early ability in writing poetry and interest in architecture supported him throughout his life. Starting his career as a journalist, he ended it as British Poet Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television. Despite being a prolific poet, Betjeman remains best known for just a single poem, Slough, written in 1937 about the community outside London which typified the transformation of the rural landscape wrought by industrialisation." -- Wikipedia