'Winter is the time for reading poetry' John Betjeman points out in his CLIPPER comfortably be-slippered essay which prefaces this collection of poems to cheer you through the wild and the wind and the wet of our darkest months. Here are many winter favourites from Walter Scott, William Cowper, the obscure English curate James Hurdis to John Clare, Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson. The selection is grouped by themes including The Start Of Winter, Winter Fires, Children in Winter, Deep Winter, The New Year and the End of Winter. With Roger McGough and Benjamin Zephaniah adding a strongly contemporary note by reading their own poems, this is a seasonable anthology to treasure.