Along with poets such as Ted Hughes, Jon Silkin, Peter Redgrove, R. S. Thomas, and Seamus Heaney, Ted Walker has contributed much to the revitalizing of British nature poetry. Ranging over the Sussex seacoast of his birth and drawing his subjects almost exclusively from the out-of-doors, he combines verisimilitude of observation with evocativeness and double entendre in lyrics shaped in traditional metric and stanzaic forms.

Walker's early years were to prove immensely important to his poetic development. His continuing deep attachment to his family and to scenes of his childhood colors both his poems and fiction. Walker was born in 1934, in Lancing, Sussex, the first child of Edward Joseph and Winifred Edith Walker. Although the beaches were mined and closed to civilians during World War II, Walker and his friends were able to return to them at the war's end. The poet reports that he enjoyed "all kinds...