The Penguin Book Of Contemporary Verse

The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1959) by Kenneth Allott (Penguin Books), ISBN: — Condition: Good — as sold by Crappy Old Books

Open this one and you can practically hear the clink of mid-century teaspoons. Kenneth Allott’s Penguin anthology is the classic pocket-sized passport to the poetry that grew up between air-raids and espresso bars: austere, jazzy, anxious, tender, occasionally hungover, always interesting. It’s a portable argument—about what counts as “contemporary,” about whether rhyme is a friend or a narc, about how much feeling you can fit into fourteen lines and a cigarette break.

Don’t come here for one single voice; come for the chorus. War diaries become love lyrics, church bells ring in industrial fog, and someone is forever writing about the sea as if it personally owes them money. You get the whole mid-century spread: poised elegance and spiky experiment, the plain-spoken and the high-flown, poems that walk you down a wet London street and poems that lift you by the collar into the metaphysical. Allott’s touch is firm but generous—he stacks the deck so you meet several styles in quick succession, which makes this less a museum and more a lively pub debate that’s been bound in paper.

This copy is in Good condition, which is to say: it’s been read like poetry ought to be read. The spine shows a dignified crease; the pages have that gentle Penguin tan; you might spot a pencil tick or two where a previous reader fell in love mid-stanza. Nothing missing, nothing mangled—just the honest patina of a book that has already converted at least one commuter.

Filed by Crappy Old Books, where the only thing “crappy” is our modesty. If you’re building (or rebuilding) your poetry ear, this is the kind of anthology that teaches you by ambush: one poem you shrug at, the next one tattoos itself on your afternoon. Read three before bed and tell yourself it still counts as an early night.

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