Every now and then, a book comes along that insists on shouldering individual collections temporarily aside. The Map and the Clock is an anthology of chronologically organised British poetry, an out-of-the-ordinary compilation – big as a brick – that will keep me reading for as long as it lives on my shelves. In her introduction, Carol Ann Duffy describes the search for poems, with Gillian Clarke, and the discovery that Shakespeare’s line still holds: “The isle is full of noises.” Their resolve was not only to include great poems, but to go under the radar, to avoid waving union jacks, to surprise us and themselves.

The book opens with Caedmon’s Hymn (600AD), translated by Paul Muldoon, the oldest known written poem – and a steadying piece. Reading it is like leaning against a cathedral door, preparing to step inside. But there is as much tavern as cathedral in this anthology and it is not long before the profane nudges the sacred with a four-line medieval poem, translated by Maurice Riordan: “There is a lady in these parts/whose name I’m slow to divulge/but she’s known to let off farts/like stones from a catapult.” 1300-1500 brings us Chaucer, Sir Gawain, Pearl, birdsong, dalliance and Anon’s beer: “Bring us in no butter, for therein are many heres/Nor bring us in no pigges flesch, for that will make us bores/But bring us in good ale!”

1500-1600 is less hearty – elegiac and windswept. It opens with Anon’s: “Western wind, when wilt thou blow” and, only a page away, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s enigmatic masterpiece: “They flee from me that sometime did me seek” – which seems to exist under the same sky. Spenser’s The Faerie Queen and Elizabeth I feature and Ben Jonson’s poem inviting a friend to supper is an invitation no friend could refuse. 1600-1700 is dominated by metaphysical playfulness and includes Herrick’s Delight in Disorder, its momentary disarray a permanent poetic prize and a companion piece to Julia in Silks, with that matchless “liquefaction” to describe the flow of her clothes. There are curiosities, too, especially Katherine Aston’s “To my Daughter Catherine on Ashwednesday 1645, finding her weeping at prayers, because I would not consent to her fasting.” After such a mouthful of a title, a brief fast might seem desirable. But the poem is fascinating: it reveals mother/daughter relationships to be as complicated in the 17th century as now.

1700-1800 is more controlled – Swift at its head. It includes A New Song of New Similes from John Gay, about being unlucky in love where splendid rhymes bumptiously undermine professed heartache. “But, false as hell! She, like the wind/Chang’d as her sex must do/though seeming as the turtle kind/And like the gospel true.” 1900-1918 begins with a majestic tranche of Yeats and then – a discovery for me – Charlotte Mew (1869-1928), thought to be chastely lesbian and one of several lesser known women included in the anthology. She was admired by Thomas Hardy and by Virginia Woolf, who described her as “quite unlike anyone else”. Her strange, fresh poems bowled me over. Duffy and Clarke allow living poets a poem each – their choices discerning, tending to favour the less familiar.

I’ve only one reservation: I’m not sure what the title, The Map and the Clock, contributes. Reading any anthology involves athletic leaps of imagination – changes of subject, mood, light and location. And while the isle is full of echoes (George Herbert’s Avarice/ Larkin’s Money), the best poems are worlds in themselves and resist signposting.

The Map and the Clock is published by Faber (£20). Click here to buy it for £16.40

Rooms by Charlotte Mew

I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room in Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide –
Rooms where for good or for ill – things died.
But there is the room where we two lie dead,
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as
well seem to sleep again
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
Out there in the sun – in the rain.