The Rags of Time adds recent poems written on the deaths of two poets, Nikos Gatsos and Constantine Trypanis, and the sculptor Elisabeth Frink to the six laments included in The Echoing Green (1983) and Shakespeare’s Birthday (1985). These sustained meditations, ‘more ragged and more raggedly felt than elegies’ in Peter Levi’s words, record and celebrate with gravity, compassion and wit nearly forty years of friendships. The poems are personal yet formal, ‘the more to be admired’ – as Anne Stevenson wrote of the poems in The Echoing Green – ‘because they are never affected in their elegance.’