A Shropshire Lad - Softcover

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award Housman is a high-water mark of British lyric poetry, and this fine production captures perfectly his strong, melodic beat and decisive rhyme, and his wonderful way with words. Samuel West's cultivated Midlands accent may not be specifically Shropshire, but his voice and reading are true to Housman who was not, after all, some rough Shropshire lad himself, but an Oxford don. His 'Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now' and 'To an Athlete Dying Young' are beautifully rendered here. West, you feel, reads poetry as it should be read confidently, with ease and conviction, as if all the world spoke in meter and rhyme. --AudioFile

Published in 1896, Housman's theme of early death became particularly poignant during the Great War. His boy soldiers follow the bugle's call to where the 'dropping dead are thick', and where one suffering 'not an ill for mending' shoots himself. Housman's rural 'land of lost content' with its ancient history, larks and daffodils and its (usually thwarted) young loves of lads and lasses echoes in nostalgic listeners' hearts. Samuel Wests's brogue brings out the Shropshire Lad's touching simplicity, and Housman's haunting rhythms and rhymes. --The Oldie

Housman is a high-water mark of British lyric poetry, and this fine production captures perfectly his strong, melodic beat and decisive rhyme, and his wonderful way with words. Samuel West's cultivated Midlands accent may not be specifically Shropshire, but his voice and reading are true to Housman who was not, after all, some rough Shropshire lad himself but an Oxford don. His Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now and To an Athlete Dying Young are beautifully rendered here. West, you feel, reads poetry as it should be read confidently, with ease and conviction, as if all the world spoke in meter and rhyme. --AudioFile

Alfred Edward Housman was an eminent classicist, holding the Professorship of Latin at University College London, and a poet. He is best known for the collection of poems known as' A Shropshire Lad' and for his translations of Juvenal, Manilius and Lucan.