It begins with a quaintly arresting poem by Elizabeth Bishop about good manners in which a child, in 1918, is required by her grandfather to greet strangers whenever she passes them. This is a long, calm distance from the 'stranger danger' that is hammered into the children at my son's primary school. The sense of distance, of getting away from the known, is one of the great pleasures here. But these are thrown in sparingly, like a judicious handful of salt into a zesty soup. I have always loved Smith's deadpan commentary on the sportively suicidal Harold.
Many poems signal to each other, as if trying to fix up a meeting.
I also found Matthew Sweeney's own contribution 'A Boy', about his escape into books, disarming. No single anthology of poetry could ever be definitive, but this anthology does what poetry anthologies so often fail to do - it made me hungry for more. It made me realise, suddenly, that children need as much poetry as possible to graze on and that variety is essential. I am aghast at the thought that childless adults may miss it. In his introduction, Sweeney writes about poems that did not make the final selection because of 'shortcomings in craft and technique'.