Jeremy Noel-Tod in the Daily Telegraph, 30 October 2004

'The "lyrical ballad" originates in the radical early poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In it, the "language of men" is made literature through the sophisticated use of simple rhyming stanzas. Later extenders of this high-naïve tradition include Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and WH Auden. All wrote out of a tension between a dying folk tradition and modern, metropolitan culture.

Two centuries after Wordsworth, however, modernity is everywhere and invocation of a "ballad tradition" sounds more faux than folk. Many British poets nevertheless remain nostalgic for lyrical balladry - Alison Brackenbury is among the sharpest. Bricks and Ballads stretches conservative verse-forms to contemporary subject matter: global warming, the "war on terror". Sometimes the combination focuses brilliantly:

It is so cold a night
The helicopter's sides
Above unseen rail lines
Flash silver flanks, not white.

At other times the simple voice grows sentimental: of unseasonal roses, Brackenbury writes: "It is not their fault that we heated the world." Her best poems strike against such predictable opinions, as when in "Transported" she confesses to delight at the sight of supermarket lorries.'