The book is dedicated to the rake, an age-old implement which connects the earth to our hands, and the landscape with the sky. Alice Oswald has chosen poems which lie along the line of encounter between the personal and the natural world - from work poems at one end of the scale (songs for lowering anchors, or for cutting cotton) to metamorphic poems in which - at the other extreme - the human has crossed entirely over into non-human. In between, there are any number of portraits of the intermediate state in which most of us spend our lives. Including poems by William Barnes, John Clare, Robert Frost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Hugh MacDiarmid, John Ashbery and many others, this anthology engages restlessly with the many-centred energies of the natural world, variously reflecting Hopkins's intuition that million-fueled, nature's bonfire burns on'.