Plainer Still

Catherine Cookson''s previous collection of essays and poems, Let Me Make Myself Plain, was published in response to the enthusiastic reception of a series of late night radio Epilogues. Now, following the remarkable success of that volume, she has compiled a further selection of thoughts, recollections, and observations on life - and death - together with another collection of the poems she prefers to describe as ''prose on short lines''.

As in Let Me Make Myself Plain, and indeed in the whole of her extensive writing, Catherine Cookson expresses her thoughts and feelings with remarkable candour and considerable wit. Above all, though, it is her down-to-earth common sense that shines through, as the forthright nature of her views expresses the hard-won philosophy of life she has developed for herself.

In Plainer Still, she reveals many of the qualities that allow her to draw upon the great inner strength she needs to continue the battle of life - one that has, for the past fifty years, given her readers endless pleasure through the medium of her many novels, each of them inspired by the harsh and uncompromising nature of her early life.

As the late John Braine wrote when reviewing Catherine Cookson Country, ''One way or another, she is an inspiration, a noble spirit.'' Readers of Plainer Still, a new personal anthology illustrated with black-and-white photographs, will certainly find themselves inspired by the indomitable spirit of this most remarkable lady.