Charles Causley is a poet who tends to come with epithets like "much-loved" — he was never a heavyweight Nobel-track intellectual, but he had a big popular following and probably counts as the most respected of the generation of British poets that emerged around the end of World War II. He wrote a lot of poetry for children, and he became a familiar voice on the radio, both of which must account for a good deal of his popularity, whilst his Cornish, working-class, war veteran background was something people found easy to identify with at the time. But, crucially, he also had the gift of expressing complex ideas in deceptively simple language (and making it rhyme!).

Secret Destinations closes with "Eden Rock", a poem that must have become a firm favourite with GCSE examiners, if the number of YouTube hits for "analysis of Eden Rock" is anything to go by. Causley imagines his parents, both in their twenties and with a picnic already set out, waiting for him on the other side of a river together with the terrier Jack.

I hear them call, "See where the stream-path is !
Crossing is not as hard as you might think."

I had not thought that it would be like this.

The collection has opened with a set of poems about Causley's relatives and his childhood in Launceston, then moves on via trips to Australia and Canada and a few translations from German and Spanish. The poem about Arshile Gorky's "The artist and his mother" (the cover image of some editions) is striking in its unspoken autobiographical subtext: looking at the serious, prematurely adult boy standing beside his care-worn but dignified mother, it's difficult not to imagine that it's a picture of Charles and Laura Causley... ( )