Carcanet Press, I am happy to say, has been publishing my work for thirty-five years. This book brings together most of the four collections they have issued, and two new ones. The first of the new ones, King Alfred’s Book & Other Poems, comprises the eleven ‘New Poems’ from my Carcanet Selected Poems (1995) and seventeen poems from The Falls, which was published by the Worple Press in 2000. The second, Report from Nowhere & Other Poems, consists of twenty-three previously unpublished poems written over the last five years. I have also revived eight poems omitted from earlier volumes: ‘The Long Climb’, the ‘Two Cambridge Images’, ‘A Plaque’, ‘The River in Springtime’, ‘The Translator’s Apology’, ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘The Source’. I have inserted these where they might have appeared in the books from which I originally excluded them. A few poems cropped up in more than one of my collections – ‘Wild Flowers’, ‘Bindweed Song’, ‘An Autumn Vision’, ‘Visitation’, ‘The Holy of Holies, ‘A Vision’, ‘W.S. Graham Reading’, ‘The Falls’ – so had to be fixed in one collection here. I have made a few revisions, but all of them are minor adjustments; I have made no substantial changes. I have also corrected some mysterious typographical errors that disfigured my Selected Poems.

In addition to my own poems I have included a large selection from my work as a translator. The thirty-six translations from Hungarian were all produced in collaboration with George Gömöri, with whom I have been working for nearly forty years and to whom I owe an enormous debt. Our versions from Miklós Radnóti were first published as Forced March (Carcanet, 1979). A new edition, revised and expanded, was published by the Enitharmon Press in 2003; all the Radnóti poems reprinted here are from that edition. Most of the poems by György Petri are taken from Eternal Monday: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1999), those by George (or György) Gömöri himself from Polishing October: New and Selected Poems (Shoestring Press, 2008) and those by János Pilinszky from Passio: Fourteen Poems (Worple Press, 2011). The poems by Anna T. Szabó were published in the Hungarian Quarterly, as were three uncollected poems by Petri; those by Jenő Dsida, István Vas and Domokos Szilágyi were anthologised in The Colonnade of Teeth: Modern Hungarian Poetry, edited by George Gömöri and George Szirtes (Bloodaxe Books, 1996).

The book includes a few commissioned pieces. The two poems written for Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where I am a Fellow in English, have both been set to music: the ‘Valedictory Ode’ for Dame Sandra Dawson by James Freeman and ‘The Sidney Carol’ by Christopher Page. Both were sung in Chapel by the College choir and have since been published in the Sidney Sussex College Annual. ‘Caedmon of Whitby’ was written as the libretto for John Hopkins’s Cantata, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 in 1993. ‘Epitaph’ has been carved on the gravestone of my late friend Michael Bulkley in Histon Road Cemetery, Cambridge. ‘Bottom’s Dream’ was commissioned for Around the Globe, the magazine of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. ‘Civitas’ was commissioned by Magdalene College, Cambridge, for its Festival of Landscape in 2009 and published in the festival anthology: Contourlines: New Responses to Landscape in Word and Image, edited by Neil Wenborn and M.E.J. Hughes (Salt Publishing, 2009).

Many items in this Collected Poems now appear in a book for the first time. Most of them were first published in the following magazines, to whose editors my thanks are due: Agenda, Around the Globe, Hungarian Quarterly, Modern Poetry in Translation, Notre Dame Review, PN Review, Poetry, Port, The London Magazine, Times Literary Supplement.