Alan Garner's stories, The Stone Book and Tom Fobble's Day, are not poems but they have the overtones, the power to stir and engage the imagination, which we expect from poetry….

The simplicity of Tom Fobble's Day is a matter of uncomplicated syntax and a direct, concrete vocabulary. At the most obvious level this suits a story of one winter day in which a boy whose sledge is Tom Fobbled [a ritual borrowing] and then broken, visits his grandfather, the local "whitesmith and locksmith, and blacksmith too", and achieves a new and far better sledge, the last of the old man's handiwork. (p. 3207)

[The theme of the book is] the continuity of work, family and the land, seen (as in The Stone Book) through the traditional craft of a Cheshire countryman. Time is marked by the alternation of light and dark and by the old man's references (always...