'This is a poet whose slightest shift can contrive excitement. His poems accumulate, perfectly flat and then perfectly suggestive, so naturally that at the second reading one of them is familiar as if one had known it for weeks or months...the quality of high imagination is plain as the sun. Read the whole book.'

               John Berryman on A Map of Verona, Partisan Review, 1948

WITH A FOREWORD BY FRANK KERMODE

Henry Reed (1914-86) is most familiar as the author of 'The Naming of Parts', the best-loved and most anthologised poem of the Second World War. He was a poet of much greater scope than that: in addition to publishing A Map of Verona, his 1946 collection, he was a fine translator, particularly from the Italian, and wrote acclaimed radio plays, including an ambitious adaptation of Moby-Dick and a series of six plays featuring his comic creation Hilda Tablet. On his death he left a sheaf of uncollected poems that had appeared in magazines or were in manuscript. These, together with all Reed's published work, a group of translations and a selection of songs from the radio plays, make up this Collected Poems. Jon Stallworthy, poet, critic and biographer of Wilfred Owen, has included a biographical and critical introduction to this profound, witty and humane poet.

Cover image 'Troops Resting' (detail) by Edward Ardizzone. Crown copyright, reproduced by permission of the Imperial War Museum.