The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry is a fresh, vibrant and richly involving collection of poems and poetic fragments, accompanied by an enlightening apparatus of comment and digression in the inimitable and unmistakable style of the Enthusiast. The 250 poems selected come from every period of literature in English, from the age of Chaucer to the age of Heaney, and from writers inhabiting every corner of the English-speaking world (and further afield): from Browning to Berryman, from Langland to Lorca, from Pope to Pasternak, from Sappho to Shelley, and from Whitman to Wordsworth. The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry enhances the reader's enjoyment and appreciation of the poems not just by highlighting their distinguishing features (choice of language, figures of speech etc.), but also via biographical and other literary-historical nuggets, intriguing and thought-provoking insights into the writing of the poems, and a host of other apposite exegetical apercus. True to the philosophy and temperament of the Enthusiast, The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry is anything but predictable. The poems chosen include some all-time greats, but also some half-forgotten and hardly known poems. And while the annotations always enlighten, they do not adhere slavishly to any set pattern and, crucially, they always set out to delight - and sometimes to provoke. Authoritative but not stuffy, irreverent but not flippant, instructive but not dogmatic, The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry is the perfect collection for anyone looking for a poetry anthology that offers something rather more than the poems themselves.