The early years of poet P.J. Kavanagh's life - which took him from a Butlin's Holiday Camp to Switzerland and Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java - made little sense to him, until 'something extraordinary happened': his meeting with Sally, 'the perfect stranger'. This tender, funny and quite unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love is as much a celebration of joy - despite its abrupt and shocking conclusion - as it is a poet's tribute of thanks.

A selection of poems of less than fourteen lines, considered by Kavanagh and Michie to be the best in the English language - from medieval times to the twentieth century.

The early years of poet P.J. Kavanagh's life - which took him from a Butlin's Holiday Camp to Switzerland and Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java - made little sense to him, until 'something extraordinary happened': his meeting with Sally, 'the perfect stranger'. This tender, funny and quite unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love is as much a celebration of joy - despite its abrupt and shocking conclusion - as it is a poet's tribute of thanks.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), considered one of the finest World War I poets, now takes his rightful place alongside the greats of English poetry. His range is wide, including the First World War, in which he served as an infantry private; passionate celebration of his native Gloucestershire; and fears of the mental imbalance which led to his eventual confinement in a mental hospital. Out of these experiences, he created poetry that is entirely unique, vigorous, musical, and direct. This selection of over 150 of his best poems, has been compiled by the poet P.J. Kavanagh from his edition of the Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney. This reissued edition offers, a few corrected readings, as well as a useful Chronology and Introduction to Gurney's life by P. J. Kavanagh.

In his foreword to this book, Derek Mahon notes that P.J. Kavanagh's poems 'elude the obvious categories. He has never been one of a "school"'. A poet of rural England, yet of Irish ancestry, Kavanagh 'has always stood slightly apart'. He championed the poems of Ivor Gurney and shares with Gurney not only a personal landscape (that of Gloucestershire) but a poetic commitment to the actual and specific, to nature writing at its most rootedly precise. His is, in Mahon's words, 'a unique personal record': 'a lifetime's dedication has produced its rich results'.