'Robert Wells understands how finely man and nature are moulded to each other. In true communion with his surroundings, a man is dowered with a wisdom and an ecstasy that nothing else else can give (and this is perhaps what he is created for),' George Mackay Brown wrote of the poet's first collection, The Winter's Task (1977). 'The healing loneliness of hills and waters, and the solitary figures who move among them - bathers, wood-cutters, hay harvesters - are the setting and characters of Wells' poems; all breath a rare wholesomeness.'

In his Selected Poems, Robert Wells includes the best work from his first book, new poems, and extracts from his acclaimed translations of Theocritus' Idylls and Virgil's Georgics, of which The Times' reviewer wrote: 'the English is direct and supple and amazingly evocative, transporting the listener back 2000 years as if under a spell'.