The present volume includes all Fanthorpe's published collections from Side Effects of 1978 to Queuing for the Sun of 2003, together with 39 new and previously uncollected poems. Her delightful Christmas Poems (2002) are included (though, unfortunately, without the illustrations of the inimitable Nick Wadley). 

Apart from her conspicuous and unflagging skill, from first poem to last — she commanded a rare verbal music and there seems to have been no form she did not master — Fanthorpe's poems radiate an unusual human warmth. 

She could be tender without ever turning soppy; she could be caustic and kind at once. Her compassion had a universal cast. It extended to "nettles and hedgehogs" as well as to vexed landscapes, as in "Earthed", an emblematic early poem:

But earthed for all that, in the chalky

Kent mud, thin sharp ridges 

        between wheel-tracks, in

Surrey's wild gravel,

In serious Cotswold uplands, where

Limestone confines the verges like 

                yellow teeth,

And trees look sideways.

In her preface, the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy makes the point that Fanthorpe "revived the monologue in poetry". Her poems, whether on cherished dogs or underground rivers (whose "silken slur haunts dwellings"), on historical figures (Tyndale, Julia Margaret Cameron), Shakespearean characters or anonymous hospital patients, tremble with individual timbres; they are seldom mere speaking masks for the poet herself. At the same time, she knew, as she put it in praise of Harpo Marx, that "silence/Has a better vocabulary". This risks making her sound overly solemn when Fanthorpe was one of the most joyous poets in recent memory. She was a celebrant of life in all its manifestations. Her work bristles with obstreperous, quite irreducible identities, all scrutinised with loving exactitude. Small wonder the last poem in this very large book evokes a Palm Sunday throng. And how fitting that her final written word should have been "Hosanna!":