Poets on poets

To mark National Poetry, Day Nick Rennison, who compiled the Waterstone's Guide to Poetry, and Michael Schmidt, editorial director of Carcanet, invited a number of contemporary poets to select work by poets of the past, beginning in the late fourteenth century and ending in the early twentieth, and to provide brief headnotes to describe their choices.

The result is an anthology with a difference. From Gower to Yeats, from the old and the new worlds, the selectors and the selected converge in a volume of wonderful poetry and rich surprise. Providing more than 450 pages of poetry and commentary in a handsome large two-column format, Poets on Poets celebrates vital continuities: the range of poets making selections and the range of poetry selected is without precedent in an English-language poetry anthology.

Its aim is to encourage a wider readership of classic English poetry and to signal the generative connection between new poetry and the best of the past.