The Saner Places: Selected Poems

Alan Brownjohn's Selected Poems provides an excellent opportunity to renew acquaintance with the most notable work of a writer whose achievement has been central to modern English poetry and its major concerns. Some poems, like his famously prophetic 'We are going to see the rabbit', will be familiar, while others will confirm with new readers his reputation as one of the most thought-provoking - and entertaining - poets committed to interpreting the modern world. His take on subjects like love (and sex), time (and mortality), and our ecological and cultural environment (threatened, and abused) is instantly recognizable; as is his assured command of the craft of poetry. Responding to his Collected Poems (Enitharmon Press 2006) Margaret Drabble said 'Wise, witty and steadfast, Alan Brownjohn is one of the most reliably enjoyable of writers. His poems - some sad, some very, very funny - are the true record of an age.' About this most recent individual book, Ludbrooke & Others, Sean O'Brien wrote ' - he approaches [the age of] 80 at full imaginative steam - If you don't find yourself laughing at and with Ludbrooke, the chances are that you're a puritan or dead or both.'