‚One of the very best of our poets‘ Anthony Powell Kingsley Amis wrote poems throughout his life, turning his acerbic, bracing perceptiveness on the same subjects that fill his novels: lust, lost love, drink, money, God (seen as indifferent or malign), and old age. Collected Poems, arranged chronologically, shows the full range of his sparkling verse, by turns scabrous and melancholy, satirical and playful.’Scathingly funny … bawdy and tragic, unflinching and unapologetic, culpable and morally acute … Amis’s poems rush headlong into the messiness of life‘ New Criterion’A contender for the title of the most accomplished and least self-satisfied poet of his generation‘ Clive James