Kingsley Amis s poetry tackles all the grimly humorous subjects he tackled in his novels lust, lost love, booze, money and the lack of it, old age, death and does so with immense formal poise. A master of both traditional and unconventional meters with a perfect ear for parody, Amis wrote satires, epigrams, and rueful songs of love and loss that are remarkable not only for their virtuosity and humor but for their scabrous realism. It all adds up to a small, entirely individual, and memorably bracing body of work. Amis writes: Beauty, they tell me, is a dangerous thing, / Whose touch will burn, but I m asbestos, see? We know he is anything but."