Written, Peter Pears explains in his preface, during the last years of her life, most of the poems [in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Twelve Poems] are concerned with old age and death. They range from a defiant monologue delivered from the floor by Queen Elizabeth as she lies dying ("like a race of trees" her people "sway, sigh, nod heads, rustle" above her) to four lines of dry epigrammatic comment on the difference between first and second childhood.

Several of the poems return to subjects dealt with in her first collection The Espalier published in 1925. In "Country Churchyard", for instance, she had imagined the dead scrambling out of their graves and dancing promiscuously because "if a maidenhead / Or marriage vow, / Doesn't tally exactly with who's under which blanket, / 'Twon't matter now". It is a vision that could have come straight from one of Stanley Spencer's Cookham churchyard resurrections. "Graveyard...