SOURCE: A review of Selected Poems, in Books and Bookmen, No. 335, August, 1983, p. 28.

A fellow of England's Royal Society of Literature, Stanford is an English educator, poet, and critic who has frequently written about Muriel Spark, Christopher Fry, and Emily and Anne Brontë. In the review below, he offers praise for Lee's Selected Poems, noting the volume's nostalgic tone and subject matter.

Some of the purest poetry of sensuous perception that has been written this century comes from the pen of Laurie Lee whose Selected Poems are a pot-pourri of intense, yet almost antiquated, sweetness.

It is more detailed, less fantasticated, than the world of childhood which Dylan Thomas created in 'Fern Hill'. Thomas' was a retrospective vision (with all the nostalgia [of] time's passing occasions). Mr Lee, at his happiest, creates a sort of perennial immediacy—though it is one of myth fed by the present rather...