Covers different varieties of poetic practice in English. This book discusses the work of poets as wide ranging as W H Auden, Dylan Thomas, Tennyson, Kipling, Milton and Blake.

The author travels across Russia, from crowded Moscow train to empty windswept villages, following in the footsteps of one extraordinary man, the dissident Orthodox priest Father Dmitry. In this book, he tells the story of a nation: famine, war, the frozen wastes of the Gulag, the collapse of communism and now, a people seeking oblivion.