Donald Davie was, par excellence, the engaged poet of our time. His poems do not pre-empt us in the way that protest or political poetry does, though he protests and is political. He was a poet of English perspectives refracted through historical mediation, essay-poem, love lyric, satire, translation (notably of the Psalter), epistle, eclogue and other forms. His passion is for our common language, its registers and tonalities, what it can do responsibly and where it can go only at its peril.

This expanded edition of the Collected Poems includes the posthumous Poems and Melodramas. It restores to print the author's own selection from his Pasternak translations and the whole of The Forests of Lithuania, and it gathers together for the first time over two dozen poems which have not previously appeared in any of his collections. It also incorporates the corrections and revisions Davie made to his own copy of the 1990 Collected Poems. The Notes which he provided for his first Collected in 1972 at last reappear, supplemented by further notes and a new editorial introduction.