A few weeks ago I mentioned in this column the remote Forest of Dean area north of M50, but there’s another area of the Forest that does not seem to be on the way from anywhere to anywhere else. Blaisdon is another area of the Forest that you are unlikely to pass through from one part of the Forest to another, and this week’s column is in celebration of ‘Celebrating Blaisdon’, a highly personal tribute, in poetic form, to this historic rural village, written by my friend Anthony Brady.

Anthony returned to the village of his youth after an eventful working life around the world, and his verses record a life that starts from and returns to the same place, the village that he describes with great affection. He writes with much sensitivity and imagination, and the book is complemented in the wonderfully evocative photography of Claire Keyse, Steve Gaskin, Mark Terry-Lush and Keith Wintle. Blaisdon is described as the ‘Star that fell from the sky’ in the poem ‘Blaisdon: What you mean to me’. ‘The Return’ is a love letter to Blaisdon, describing all the features of the village that he remembers and loves, including the Red Hart pub, which earns a further poem all to itself.

It’s a charming book which eloquently records the village’s unspoiled fields, buildings and wild life, which retained all its special features and losing none during his years of exile. There are moving tributes to old friends who have died, and after his faraway adventures he records his thoughts of this unchanged village which retains the charm that he remembers from his early days.

He has his own rules for poetry. There’s no pedantic adherence to conventional poetic rules, as he slips quite effortlessly from rhyme to half rhyme to blank verse, and sometimes dissolves into prose, without losing the poetic impact.

There is some evidence of influence by other British poets, as he parodies John Masefield, the Ledbury-born Poet Laureate, converting ‘I must go down to the sea again’ to ‘I must go down to the pub again’, in his eulogy for the Red Hart. There are echoes of Dylan Thomas as Anthony considers the innocence of youth when one is held by time although being ‘young and easy’. Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’ poem has a similar theme.

Even Wordsworth couldn’t get daffodils to talk back to him, but Anthony succeeded in getting a charming springtime message from them which he recorded in his poem ‘Showing Off in Hinders Lane’.

The mood becomes more sombre in ‘Nocturn’ as the writer grows older, and ‘Winter Morning’ is bleak and cold. But the writer returns to some light hearted verses in his final two poems, the legendary ‘Blaisdon Plum’ and the charming but furtive ‘Bullfinch’, a bird which as Anthony so helpfully advises is not a bull but is ‘every inch a finch’. It’s a suitably gentle bucolic verse to complete a comprehensive visit to a charming forest village.