In this new selection from the poetry of Walter de la Mare (the first of its kind for fifty years), Matthew Sweeney draws on the full range of his published work, from Poems (1906) to O Lovely England (1953), and includes a generous selection of the poems and rhymes for children.
'From his children and ghosts one learns little about children and nothing about ghosts, but one learns a great deal of the reality of which both his ghosts and his children are projections, of the wishes and lacks and love that have produced their "unreality" [...] His best poems are full of personal distinction, the involuntary individuality that are marks of a real poet.' - Randall Jarrell
'His most obvious virtues, those which no reader can fail to see immediately, are verbal and formal, the delicacy of his metrical fingering and the graceful architecture of his stanzas.' - W.H. Auden