In this collection, Elizabeth Jennings includes the poems which helped shape her taste - poems she read at school, or discovered in book shops and the library, or pored over as an under-graduate-work which first gave her a taste for the art of poetry and taught the formal and thematic skills she has practiced for fifty years. Many of the poems chosen will be familiar to poetry lovers: what is exciting is the way she brings them together in a kind of commonplace book, conveying to a new audience the magic that enchanted her. This anthology is a window on the personal culture of one of our best-loved writers. 'She is one of the few living poets we could not do without,' Peter Levi said.