Housman Country is Shropshire, the landscape of wooded hills and buried villages that we know from A Shropshire Lad, the collection of melancholy, clipped, aching poems that A E Housman published in 1896. In fact, Housman, born and bred in Worcestershire, did not know Shropshire well and later conceded that some the topographical details in his book were wrong. Housman Country was really a landscape of the imagination, its cherished place names – Bredon Hill, Clee, Wenlock Edge – chosen for euphony rather than personal associations. It is this imaginary place that Peter Parker explores in his new book, written with some of the elegant restraint he admires in his chosen author.
As Parker’s subtitle indicates, he feels that there is something peculiarly English in the achievement and the appeal of Housman’s poetry. So much is this book a homage to that poetry that it prints the whole of A Shropshire Lad as a kind of appendix,
encouraging the reader to keep turning to and reading (or, more probably, rereading) the particular lyrics under discussion. Parker’s method is unusual but rewarding. Though there are sections of biographical narrative, the book is not chronologically ordered. Instead it takes themes in Housman’s poetry and circles ruminatively around them. This makes an advantage out of a necessity: Housman was private, retentive, resistant to all inquiry. The fund of stories about him is very limited and was spent long ago.
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