Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee (1914-1997) is famous for the life he wrote about so engagingly in three volumes of autobiography, but his first love was always poetry, a passion that left its mark on his precise and lyrical prose. Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the eleventh of twelve children. At nineteen he left his native village to seek his fortune, walking to London where he worked for a year as a building labourer. Eventually he had 3 collections of poetry and wrote in a variety of forms – travel books, essays, a radio play, and short stories, as well as further volumes of autobiography.

Apples

Behold the apples’ rounded worlds:

juice-green of July rain,

the black polestar of flowers,

the rind mapped with its crimson stain.

The russet, crab and cottage red

burn to the sun’s hot brass,

then drop like sweat from every branch

and bubble in the grass.

They lie as wanton as they fall,

and where they fall and break,

the stallion clamps his crunching jaws,

the starling stabs his beak.

In each plump gourd the cidery bite

of boys’ teeth tears the skin;

the waltzing wasp consumes his share,

the bent worm enters in.

I, with as easy hunger, take

entire my season’s dole;

welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour,

the hollow and the whole.

— Laurie Lee