`Reed Music’ is Peter Levi’s first collection of completely new work since `Shadow and Bone’ (1989). In these exhilarating poems he combines a watercolourist’s gift for the spontaneous evocation of a scene with a very different gift for formal elegy. In addition to individual poems about friends, the English landscape, the Welsh borders and human mortality, there are four substantial sequences including `Poem for the Time of Day’, a beautiful meditation as dusk falls at Gillan Creek in Cornwall.

Peter Levi, who died in 2000, was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1984. Until 1977 he was a Jesuit priest. He was a classicist whose writing includes three uncategorizable books - on modern Greece, Afghanistan, and the English landscape - as well as translations, critical and scholarly works, and a thriller. But he was first and foremost a poet.