I attended Joy Scovell’s funeral at Oxford Crematorium in the company of Anne Ridler, who had introduced me to her over a decade before. In the front row I remember three of her sisters, some older (she had been well into her nineties). What a stalwart family it seemed, and how together! At the end we sang ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended’, and parts of Psalm 103. Robert Elton offered a family tribute. Theresa Frayn spoke of the poet, Katie Buffonge read a poem of Joy’s, and Wilma Elton read Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’. Literary tributes came from the novelist Maggie Gee and from me, her publisher.

That event on 30 December 1999, millennium end, was a celebration. The blue plaque event twenty-five years later was even more of a celebration as the poet and her husband were recalled, their home marked for posterity. I know that Joy’s poems have a posterity. It is not a popular posterity, she won’t become a set text. It is a presence that single readers will happen upon in anthologies and follow up: her singular poems let us in to a unique and unexpected imagination, timeless in its concerns, deft in its forms, an imagination rooted in a tradition which survives despite changes in fashion. We know her as a translator but especially, to use the words of that severest twentieth-century critic and anthologist Geoffrey Grigson, ‘a poet less concerned with celebrity and self-importance than with being alive and in love’. She is, he added, ‘the purest woman poet of our time’. ...