The lamentation of the dead has been a preoccupation in Peter Levi's recent poetry, as well as the subject of his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1984. Few poets of our time have found ways in which to compose such sustained meditations on matters of life and death as Peter Levi has done in these personal yet formal poems. `Shakespeare's Birthday' collects three laments - in memory of Charles Haldeman, Caryl Brahms and Alasdair Clayre - written since those included in `The Echoing Green' (1983), to which this forms a companion volume.

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.