Coleshill, a nineteenth-century model village on the borders of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, is a microcosm of contemporary rural life. It includes organic dairy herds, prairie fields, community-owned windmills, lovingly-tended vegetable gardens, lamping for hares, a shoot, a Peace Fete, a Neolithic hill fort, a nursery school, a pub and just about the same number of inhabitants -- two hundred, give or take a newborn -- that it had in the Domesday book.

At the same time its countryside still offers our best chance of observing the natural world. Three different species of ladybird co-exist on a house wall, and the first lapwings return; a spring shifting in the limestone water-table floods the lane, and buzzards nest in the beech trees on Kings Hill.

Coleshill explores the village as both community and place. Starting with a "braid" of poems about the genetic bond between all members of every human group, it then launches into a series of portraits of the members of the village community. Each speaks for him or herself -- we eavesdrop on their inner lives as they worry, fall asleep, mourn, plan, flirt and work. The book ends with a sequence of sonnets about the place itself.

Coleshill follows the cycle of a year and creates a meditative portrait of real life in the country, bringing the people living there to life.