Triumphant Demons stand, and Angels start, To see the abysses of the human heart. -- Landor English poetry is supposed to be short in epigrams. But here there is a choice of more than 700 epigrams and epitaphs (which are epigrams of a special kind) from the sixteenth century to our time, familiar, unfamiliar, and even unknown. This ancient art of witty and satirical and also tender compression - an art as old as Plato and as young as the youngest living poet - has found its English masters in Herrick, Prior, Pope, Blake, Burns, Walter Savage Landor, Patmore and in twentieth-century masters Belloc and Robert Graves, all poets of strong liking or disliking. But poet after poet, major and minor and anon, has hated, loved, laughed, ridiculed, in couplets and quatrains, taking his cue from the great Latin epigrammatist Martial, from the Latin epigrammatists of the Renaissance (in Elizabethan times every Winchester schoolboy was expecting to be able to write a neat Latin epigram) or from the Greek Anthology of from his own English (and French) predecessors. Here lie the bones of Elizabeth Charlotte, That was born a virgin and died a harlot. She was aye a virgin at seventeen, An extraordinary thing for Aberdeen. -- Anon He served his God so faithfully and well That now he sees him face to face, in hell. -- Belloc

'Places enter poems, sometimes incidentally, sometimes penetrating the poems as if place were their whole substance. It is not surprising. After all in places we grow up. Place is our external condition; place is garden, field, landscape, woods, fells, springs, rivers, estuaries, beaches, valleys, villages, towns, streets. Place is sunshine, rain, snow, ice. It is west, east, north and south. It is where the seasons change. Our feeling flows into places, and an accumulation of feeling, historical, cultural and personal, flows back from places into our consciousness.' So Geoffrey Grigson introduces an anthology of 'poems in which place is prominent' which ranges not only geographically over the entire British Isles and the whole history of poetry in English, but includes sections on the landscape of France and Italy; there are poems in French about London and in English about Sorrento. Tennyson said: 'A known landscape is to me an old friend that continually talks to me of my own youth and half-fogotten things.' This and the related feelings for place find their expression and evocation in a selection of nearly three hundred poems which cannot fail to give pleasure to those who share those feelings, 'poetry lovers' or not, and shows Geoffrey Grigson's gifts as an anthologist to full advantage.

Jean de la Fontaine (1621-95) freely plundered the works of Aesop, Phaedrus, Bidpai and others to transform the world's great fables into charming poems of astonishing originality, wit and verve. Here he depicts lions, frogs, donkeys, rats, insects, birds and wily foxes in situations that reveal the quirks, follies and frailties he observed in humankind. Sins of pride, greed and vanity come under humorous attack - a cunning fox tricks a crow out of his dinner, an arrogant hare loses a race to a steady tortoise, a merry cicada who sings all summer finds herself hungry in winter, and the goddess Juno scolds a peacock who covets a nightingale's song. But faith in human nature can also be found in poems such as those in which a wolf is saved from choking by a helpful stork, demonstrating an engaging belief in the possibilities of redemption.

Originally published in 1948, and edited by the artist John Piper, An English Farmhouse is Geoffrey Grigson's careful survey of the old English farmhouse, and its associated buildings, whether made from sarsen, thatch, timber, tile or brick. Grigson paints a vivid and human picture of rural life in the preceding centuries and creates a delicate weave of social history.