Selected Poems

This selection of Betjeman's verse, written from the 1930s through the later twentieth century, is devoted to English places and the people who inhabit them: suburban churches, tennis clubs, railways, seaside towns, and Victorian architecture threatened by demolition. Speakers are often lonely, comic, or already imagining their own funerals. Light verse and hymn-like stanzas sit beside satires on planners and developers. There is no narrative through-line. The book is a topographical lyric collection, not a guidebook and not an autobiography in prose.

Bound in white cloth blocked with a multi-coloured design. Dark red slipcase.