Poetry Please: The Seasons

Book excerpt: This new anthology of poems, favourites from the nation's longest-running and best-loved request programme for verse, moves with the seasons, following the turning year from John Clare's 'pale splendour of the winter sun' to John Keats's 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness', by way of Larkin's 'young-leafed June' and Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'glassy peartree leaves and blooms' when 'Nothing is so beautiful as Spring'. As the year changes, so we change with it. Since time out of mind our daily lives have been shaped and directed by the seasons, and it is here that we find poems about harvest and hardship, growth and new life, the warmth of the life-giving sun, Christmas and the closing of the year. Poetry Please: Seasonal Poems is a vital and generous gathering to treasure.