Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry: Selected by William Sieghart, Founder of the Forward Prizes Kindle Edition

One poem per author, this selection from the annual Forward anthologies of 2001-2010 gives a window on what has been happening in the world of short-poem writing. There are omissions I'd regret - nothing from Stephen Romer, Harry Eyres or Olivia McCannon for example - and the range leans towards the obviously accessible. One trend emerges, that too many of these "poems" are really only carefully crafted bits of prose that have been sliced up into shorter lines. They are well done (hence the "gracious" in the title above) but they are in a sense a "fall from grace" in that collectively we seem to have drifted from the essence of poetry that was discernible up to say Seamus Heaney. Having said that, there are many things to enjoy here. I commend the Forward initiative and I continue to leaf through with pleasure.

I bought this for school and in terms of the quality it was not great as it already had some annotations and multiple places where it was highlighted but that was probably because I bought it second hand.In terms of the actual book, it's a good book and has loads of poems in. I'm using it for my English Literature in school and it's got a good amount of space to annotate and a full contents page of all the poems within it.

I bought this as I'm an English tutor, and my student was using this book to prepare for the Unseen Poetry question. It's actually a lovely collection of thought provoking poems for anyone to keep by their bedside. I fully recommend this book, and the seller. It came undamaged and promptly. Thanks.

Good, but a mixed bag of poems which moved me and poems which I moved past,which is to be expected in an anthology of many, very different, poets.

As a Year 12 student I purchased this book as I am studying 20 poems from it. It is amazing! The page quality is amazing and overall I'm very pleased with it. It also contains loadsss of other poems which makes good practice for the unseen poetry questions! :)