Common Ground was such a tour de force that I hesitated getting The Heeding. I need not have hesitated: both NIck Hayes’ artwork and Rob Cowen’s poetry are sensitive and well crafted- and work exceptionally well together. Both contribute to the theme which starts with the message at the start: pay heed; read the signs of the times. And just in case you need me to underline it, the times are the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Watch with care the spider as she exhibits “the patience of 300 million years;” recognise the allotment sheds at sunset and know how ephemeral our tenancy is of an allotment - or of life itself. There are beautiful, painful insights, rage against misinformation, relief at a blue tit’s escape in flight… The cliché is “all human life is here,” but this collection is rooted in particular experience, the hawk on the motorway “Map-reader from a chick,” the old woman at the pharmacy, “coddling the staff” in the painful loneliness of lockdown. Poems and images sit in a particular place but have a timeless quality. This is a book to treasure.