O love, be fed with apples while you may
And feel the sun, and go in royal array,
A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway.
Though in what listening horror for the cry
That soars in outer blackness dismally,
The dumb blind beast, the paranoiac fury,
Be warm, enjoy the season, lift your head,
Exquisite in the pulse of tainted blood,
That shivering glory not to be despised.
Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark, a shining space
With the grave's narrowness, though not its peace.
 

from `Between Dark and Dark' (1929)
           

In this second volume of the Complete Poems all of Robert Graves's work from 1927 to 1942 -- the Laura Riding Period, as series editor Patrick Quinn describes it in the Centenary Selected Poems -- is included. `The Cool Web', `Flying Crooked', `Down, Wanton, Down!', `Never Such Love', `Danegeld', `Parent to Children' and other favourite anthology pieces date from this rich period in which Robert Graves makes the astonishing transition from his early work and becomes incontestably one of the great lyric poets of the century.

In 1995, the centenary of his birth, Carcanet launched an ambitious Robert Graves Programme which, in one decade, is intended bring into print all his major work. The series commenced appropriately with the poems.