The manuscript labelled Cotton Nero A.x in the British Library contains four narrative poems written in a West Midlands dialect in the latter part of the 14th century. We know the names of the poems - 'Pearl', 'Cleanness', 'Patience', and 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' - but not the name of the poet, which is a tad unfortunate, as 'Pearl' and 'Gawain' are two of the brightest jewels of Middle English literature.

Pearl is an elegy by a father for his dead daughter, in the form of a religious dream vision, made popular by the 'Roman de la Rose', in 1,212 alliterative lines of 12 line octosyllabic stanzas. 'From the point of view of its metrical form', argued AC Cawley and JJ Anderson in their edition of the poem published by Dent in 1977, '"Pearl" is probably the most complex poem written in English'. Kenneth Sisam, in Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose, said: 'If 'Piers Plowman' gives a realistic picture of the drabness of Medieval life, "Pearl" shows a richness of imagery and a luxuriance in light and colour that seem scarcely English.'

Jane Draycott, whose collections include Prince Rupert's Drop, The Night Tree and Over, wanted 'to move away from the striuct regularity of the original towards a more fluid and echoing character'. Bernard O'Donoghue, in his introduction, praises her achievement as 'a rare model of how to modernise and be faithful at the same time'.

Her translation, while not as good an undergraduate crib as that of JRR Rolkien in 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', 'Pearl' and 'Sir Orfeo' (Allen & Unwin, 1975), is nontheless imaginatively and elegantly done, as was clear when the first two sections were published as a taster a couple of years ago in Modern Poetry in Translation, edited by David and Helen Constantine.

Here are two examples of the beauty, and the precision, of her poetry: 'Like the moment when the moon appears / before the dropping light of day'; 'And through this watching sears my heart / and wrings the wires of sadness tighter, / still the song this silence sings me / is the sweetest I have heard'. There's a lot of Medieval theology, too; trying, as Milton put it, 'to justify the ways of God to me': 'So we were damned / to die in midery, deprived of light / and dragged down to the fires of hell / to dwell there with no refuge or escape / until the end of our long agony / arrived as holy blood and water / running on a rough and cruel cross', but Draycott handles it with aplomb.

Her version of 'Pearl' should be set beside the Simon Armitage 'Gawain' and Seamus Heaney's translation of the Old English epic 'Beowulf' for making our native, Early English, alliterative tradition fresh for the 21st century.