In Pam Ayres’s moving idyll Leaving, the past imbues the present with a sense of life’s brevity. Fondly remembering a well-trodden countryside footpath where the ‘cowslips dance and harebells blow’, the poet longs to return to ‘A little stream that quiet lies, / With water voles and dragonflies’. The nostalgia is echoed and intensified by music of exceptional subtlety and beauty. The poem closes with a meditation on those most precious, intrinsic bonds of familial love, while the music, in increasingly diaphanous textures, is at its most affecting. With poignant lyrics from one of the nation’s favourite living poets, Leaving would make an apt conclusion to a reflective or valedictory programme, since words and music continue to resonate well beyond the final double bar.

Leaving is one of ten new poems commissioned and set to music by Russell Hepplewhite in his landmark choral anthology Living Voices, published by Stainer & Bell. See here for more information on the other pieces in the collection. Leaving is also the final poem in Pam Ayres’s collection Doggedly Onward, published in 2024 by Ebury.