The genesis of this is Cronin's weekly column in the Irish Independent, which tends to be accompanied by some poem of his choice. Here is a choice of 70 of them, and he states explicitly that while he believes they are "good poems", the result is above all a personal anthology and not a historical survey. Cronin also makes a few much-needed points against the kind of Eng Lit pedantry which insists on decoding poems for the reader and hunts out abstruse clues to their "meaning". What is mildly surprising is the percentage of old favourites, some of which had almost vanished in recent years - including pieces by Katherine Tynan, Alice Meynell and Leigh Hunt ("Jenny Kissed Me"). However Hart Crane, John Betjeman, John Hewitt, David Wright, Francis Stuart, Louis MacNeice prevent the anthology from being at all chintzy and make for a good balance between traditional and modern. Each poem is accompanied by an introductory prose piece, brief, illuminating and unpretentious.