the warm, familiar chalk soil of Hampshire
vēl viens izcils rakstītājs, brits
(Hitčens recenzē Greja jaunāko grāmatu)

As I think Gray understands very well, a good poem may describe more than it apparently expresses. This is not least because it will be concerned precisely with unimaginable reality. I considered that unimaginable reality recently as I looked down into a grave in the warm, familiar chalk soil of Hampshire in England, and contemplated the coffin, already half-covered with earth, of a good friend, younger than I am, who has just gone into eternity a little way ahead of me. And it was the profound poetry of monotheism, specifically that of the English Prayer Book, what Philip Larkin tried and failed to dismiss as a “vast moth-eaten musical brocade, created to pretend we never die,” that best enabled me to consider and respond to the unimaginable reality of the fact that in the midst of life, I was in death.

https://home.isi.org/john-gray-spinoza-today