NEGLECTED for more than a century, John Clare was honoured with a place in Poets’ Corner, in Westminster Abbey, in 1989.

Since then, the reputation of the untutored son of a Northamptonshire farm labourer has soared. He is now recognised as one of England’s greatest poets. His work spans all the human emotions from love to despair, with not a little anger thrown in, chiefly at the enclosure of his beloved open-field countryside.

Re-published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of his death in May, The Shepherd’s Calendar is the most sustained showcase of his work: a month by month record of the country year – not only shepherding, but ploughing, haymaking, harvesting, feasts and festivals such as May Day and Christmas.

Flowers, birds, animals and insects are also closely observed, not merely as specimens, but from Clare’s human perspective. Deceptive March sun for instance sees ...butterflies by eager hopes undone Glad as a child come out to greet the sun, Lost ‘neath the shadow of a sudden shower Nor left to see tomorrow’s April flower.

This reviewer regrets a decision was made to print the poem with Clare’s original spellings and without punctuation, which Clare never used. Though the sense is almost always clear, surely the aim should be to make things as easy as possible for the modern reader? Still, in hardback and with beautiful woodcuts by David Gentleman, this is a book to treasure.

Harry Mead

Meadowland: The Private Life Of An English Field by John Lewis-Stempel (Doubleday, £14.99) 4/5 stars

HISTORIAN and farmer John Lewis-Stempel’s family have lived in Herefordshire for 700 years and a sense of history pervades this chronicle of wrens and robins, campion and dandelion clocks, moles and badgers, which charts a year in the life of his meadow, simply told month by month. It’s the vignettes that suck us in: how flirtatious wrens court in the spring and how the curlew lands 20 yards from its nest, creeping in on foot so predators don’t follow its descent to the chicks.

The farming year appears, too: when his mower breaks, Lewis- Stempel dusts off the scythe and mows hay by hand, uprooted voles scuttling indignantly up his trouser-legs. He is delighted and fascinated by his small corner of the earth, from its resident fox family to its biodiverse cow dung. It’s enough to make any reader want their own meadowland.

Kitty Wheater