''I first read a W. S. Graham poem in 1949. It sent a shiver down my spine. Forty-five years later nothing has changed. His song is unique and his work an inspiration.'' Harold Pinter.

From his first publications in the early 1940s, to his final works of the late 1970s, W. S. Graham has given us a poetry of intense power and inquisitive vision - a body of work regarded by many as among the best Romantic poetry of the twentieth century. This New Collected Poems, edited by poet and Graham-scholar Matthew Francis and with a foreword by Douglas Dunn, offers the broadest picture yet of Graham''s work.