LOCAL poet Nicholas Dykes is "the captive" of his country, by which he means Herefordshire, where he was born.

If there is occasionally an echo of Yeats in his collection, "Shire Child", this is because Yeats was grounded in the Irish landscape and Mr Dykes clearly enjoys the local soil beneath his feet. Biographical details are never far away from Mr Dykes, as they were for Yeats; and there is defiance too that the love of simple things should not be taken for simplicity. This is also a Yeatsian quality, and no bad thing.

In "Simple Things", Mr Dykes writes, "Does it make me a simpleton,/loving so these simple things?/ I who have crossed mental swords/ with learned men and sages..."

But he differs from Yeats in that the "Celtic twilight", the presence of the supernatural, is absent from his own world picture.

These are secular hymns, grounded in the individual, but shared with a geniality of character. In "First Call of a Redwing," for instance, the bird call seems to take away the concept of man's immortal soul. The soul here is a false concept, "vanishing, traceless into space". Only nature remains; and this leaves the man realising, "I was the runner in my blood".

A sense of the spiritual, then, is a personal creation.

These are not easy concepts to grasp, perhaps, but Mr Dykes has a lyrical gift and a conviction that human existence, whatever it is, is worth the song; and Mr Dykes does sing, throughout this challenging but accessible collection.

Copies are available now from Ledbury Books and Maps and the Three Counties Bookshop, in Ledbury High Street.