Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry
Edited by Peter Forbes
Penguin £12.99, pp596
Buy it at BOL

A plethora of fin-de-siècle poetry anthologies arrived last year, and Forbes's work is almost certainly the best. From the front cover - Misrach's retro Chrysler Newport on the Bonneville Salt Flats - to the rear index, which links poems with the events of the century, it drips readability. This is not a book to carry into a party or a pub - it will be stolen, as mine was, three times.

Forbes, editor of the Poetry Review, has taken a huge, inspired gamble and won. He decided to lump the poems of the past century into categories parametered by time and politics. It could have been a shambles, but it isn't. It manages to be two fine things: a definitive anthology of the century's poetry and an education.

Poetry is often viewed as needlessly inward and ignorant of circumstance, but Forbes has seen the power of the brains at work here and set every poem within its temporal milieu, be it revolution, Holocaust or Thatcherism. The prescience of the writers is, in hindsight, astonishing. Read Brodsky at the start or Fenton at the end, and marvel at the way poets of all nations have quietly beaten journalists, politicians, satirists and tyrants at their own game, a few years before they even started playing.

There will be quibbles because of Forbes's imposed strictures, but the strictures are loose, and this writer's only complaint is that no room could be found in the Thirties chapter for MacNeice's 'London Rain', perhaps the most priapically honest poem written in the past 100 years. And there's no Rilke. But every reader who finds one favourite lacking will find five new ones to embrace.

This is a book which, while gently celebrating the power of poetry, more rightly emphasises the genius of those who chose, while struggling through mankind's best and worst century, to write poetry.