The Laburnum Branch by Naomi Mitchison (1926)

This is the first of Mitchison's two volumes of published poetry, set so far apart at either end of her career. It is full of her classic brand of natural exuberance. What makes it remarkable is the fact that the poetry is occasionally technically quite poor, with bad overruns of line-length marring the rhythm and lack of finish causing fatal trailoff. Her inimitable enthusiasm saves it. Ranging through all sorts of subjects from history to childbirth to friendship to politics, she sometimes effuses in a unmeasured way which survives its own lack of foresight mysteriously. At other times the work is strongly fortified with rhyme and rhythm and just as affecting. The poems are divided into nine sections which are vaguely thematic. I remember reading, I think in one of the volumes of her autobiography, that she had loads of unpublished poetry in a bottom drawer at home. I hope that this has been saved following her death at the age of 101 in January 1999. And the reading of The Cleansing of the Knife, the extraordinarily-belated 1978 successor to this volume, will take on extra meaning. Mitchison is not known for poetry, or for poetry in her prose, but it's there. Just, in her usual and low-key way, it gleams from behind her emanations of stalwart personality.