This Selected Poems draws on Scovell's Collected Poems (1988), which Paul Bailey in the Sunday Times hailed as 'the crowning achievement of a long writing life... This is a wonderful book. The poetry of her serene old age is as fresh and lyrical as that she wrote sixty years ago, when she first declared her lasting interest in "sorrowful creaturehood".'

E.J. Scovell was born in 1907. She was married to the ecologist Charles Elton, and spent some time working in the South and Central American rain forests with him. She lived in Oxford, UK.