Shadow and Bone is Peter Levi’s first collection of poems since Private Ground (1981), apart from two small books of ‘lamentations’ – formal elegies for friends – The Echoing Green and Shakespeare’s Birthday. It is a rich and diverse collection, varied in subject and verse-forms. There are sequences about railway posters and America, poems for friends and fellow scholars or poets, poems about marriage and the natural world, epigrams, a magnificent long poem on the meaning of Christmas, and meditative lyrics.