Alongside such familiar favourites as Edward Thomas's Adlestrop, John Masefield's Sea-Fever, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Stevie Smith's Not Waving But Drowning, here are Jenny Joseph threatening to be a disreputable old lady, Patrick Chalmers on the wisdom of the fairground, V.L. Edminson on a good cure for bad temper and F.W. Harvey' celebrating the comical duck. Heroism, the seasons, birth, death, work and eccentric characters: these are poems for every mood and taste, from the whole range of verse in English.