In this book Tony Curtis, himself an award-winning poet, offers clear and positive help to students who are faced by a modern poem which puzzles and frightens them. How do we proceed to construct a critical response to a poem which may not rhyme, may not have metrical regularity, may not be written in verses or even have conventional punctuation? This book deals imaginatively and originally with such problems. It also provides helpful critical readings of many of the major poems of the post-war years, by poets such as Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, R S Thomas, Dannie Abse and William Carlos Williams.