Throw, Swilven, your dark shadow,
And never let a day go down
Without the monstrous mountain thrown;
For, waking in a darker meadow,
Still your inveterate lover,
I may shake off earth's cover
And flying in ghostly escapade
Mingle your shadow with my colder shade.

'Swilven'

Andrew Young's poetry came into its own in the mid-1930s. He was nearly fifty when he achieved the terse, individual style of his maturity. Despite changes of fashion he remains popular; his unusual nature poems are widely anthologised. 'His works are in no danger of being forgotten,' Philip Larkin said; and C. S. Lewis: 'There has been nothing so choice, so delicate and so controlled in this century.'

Selected Poems includes all of Young's best-known short poems and the extended mystical poem 'Into Hades'. A number of the poems are illustrated by Joan Hassalls' vivid wood engravings. The book has been assembled by the poet Edward Lowbury and his wife Alison Young, Andrew Young's daughter. They recently published a critical biography of Andrew Young, To Shirk No Idleness, which illuminates this enigmatic man whom Norman Nicholson regarded as 'one of the safest bets for immortality.'