Ivor Gurney's Gloucestershire by Eleanor Rawling

Anyone who reads Ivor Gurney’s poems will recognise how deeply they are rooted in landscape. Gurney’s passion for the lush Severn meadows and the steep Cotswold hills shines through his work. So it is not surprising that a Gloucestershire author has brought this passion to life.

Eleanor Rawling has been exploring Gurney country all her life. She has also spent her career studying and teaching geography. Which means her first instinct on reading a Gurney poem is to connect it to a particular place.

This is an ambitious book. Part biography, part literary criticism, part investigation of the landscape, it is filled with maps of all kinds. Location maps identify key places in Gurney’s life. Geological maps reveal layers of history, and four detailed walking maps chart the routes the poet took.

Armed with this fascinating guide, readers can walk in Gurney’s footsteps and experience for themselves the scenes that inspired such glorious poems as Cotswold Ways, Crickley Cliffs and Quietude.

Ivor Gurney’s life was shaped by suffering and exile.

He served as a soldier in the First World War, and spent his last 15 years in a mental asylum. Rawlings charts each stage of the poet’s life, and investigates important places in his development. In a final map, she charts ‘Gurney’s places’, identifying ‘Places of joy and learning’, ‘Places of pain and beauty’ and ‘Places of memory and loss’.

“One comes across the strangest things in walks”, Gurney wrote in the opening lines of Cotswold Ways. Rawling’s book will take you on a journey of discovery to some intriguing places.

* Eleanor Rawling will be at the Witney Book Festival on Saturday.

Review by Jane Bingham, the author of The Cotswolds: A Cultural History (Signal, £12).