Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet who has also become renowned as an energetic generous & thought-provoking guide to reading poetry. Her 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem" with its lively overview of contemporary writing & eye-opening readings of individual poems is indispensable for anyone who writes poetry teaches it or simply wants to enjoy it. In her new book she uses sixty poems by some of our finest poets to look at the idea of the journey through literature & through life. As Padel makes clear in her fascinating introduction todays debates about how accessible a poem should be are poetrys older tradition. To rhyme or not to rhyme? The Elizabethans fought over that one while the Greeks couldnt agree about whether poetry should be dumbed down or remain the preserve of the elite. Combining her training as a Classicist with her insights as a poet Padel highlights the ways in which the best poets now find a balance between rhymed formal verse & modernisms freer styles using a traditional formal craft to convey genuinely felt up-to-the-minute experience. In an increasingly unstable world she argues we need poetry more than ever to help us to see afresh & understand the journeys of our lives."