Collected Poems of Philip Larkin

This collection brings together Larkin's published volumes - The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows - with uncollected and later pieces. The poems are set in provincial England: railway stations, rented rooms, churches visited out of curiosity, hospitals, and parks. Speakers watch weddings from a train, count the cost of marriage and childlessness, and measure time against libraries, jazz, and the approach of death. Tone runs from dry comedy to plain fear. The book is lyric rather than narrative, a body of short poems about disappointment, work, lust, and the wish to be elsewhere.

Three-quarter bound in green cloth spine title blocked in white with a paper front board, printed with a colour design by Richard Peacock. Green endpapers. Plain slipcase.