Someone had to take on the enormous - and political - job of deciding what is pestilence and what is poetry, what is worth keeping and what worth forgetting. Long after reviewers stop debating howRicks chose each item, readers will keep returning to these pages to find yet another good poem they've not before seen.'Publishers Weekly, 25/10/99, Ricks has steered a canny course between tradition and innovation. such anthologies stand or fall on findings from minor authors, and Ricks offers a bounty of obscure poems. He has done the job beautifully.'John Mullan, Evening Standard and Yorkshire Post 27/9/99, 'Ricks must be one of the few people on the planet both famous enough to be asked to remake this book and widely enough read to do it well. 'The most exacting and lucid close-reader of poetry, his criticalvirtuosity has allowed him to escape the narrow historical specialisms of otherprofessors. Lyric, laughter, song, satire, story: this is an anthology to move and delight all who find themselves loving English verse. For the first time, wonderful poems that are also translations are included, likewise nursery rhymes, clerihews, and the great dramatic verse of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Ampler in range - up to Hughes and Heaney - it combines celebrated poems with a wealth of newly-chosen works, giving us 'Sumer is icumen in' and Anna Seward's 'OldCat's Dying Soliloquy', Keats's 'To Autumn' and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market', Hugh MacDiarmid's 'O Wha's the Bride?', Stevie Smith's 'Not Waving but Drowning', Larkin's 'Mr Bleaney', andhundreds more. With its fresh and glittering choice of the jewels of English poetry, Christopher Ricks's Oxford Book of English Verse - third in succession, after Arthur Quiller-Couch's original volume (1900) and Helen Gardner's new selection (1972) - is a treasury from more than seven centuries of the poet's art.
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