Peter Levi, who died in 2000, was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1984. Until 1977 he was a Jesuit priest. He was a classicist whose writing includes three books on modern Greece, Afghanistan, and the English landscape. This title includes his early books, pamphlets and other uncollected poems.

In these poems written since `Five Ages' (1978), Peter Levi continues to explore man's elemental relationship with the natural world, recording his sense of the indivisible unity of life in its changing aspects.

Peter Levi is one of the most accomplished and individual lyric poets now writing. This is his fourth collection, containing 40 poems, mostly written - some in Greece and Afghanistan, the majority in England - since the publication of `Fresh Water, Sea Water' (1966). They develop the intimate, almost mystical element which is the keynote of his work. John Bayley writing in `Agenda' described this as "his power of taking an active situation, emotion or longing, and revealing beneath and around it the quality that Napoleon called `repose'." `Death is a Pulpit', containing poems written for public performance, is published simultaneously.

This book contains five poems, each written for public performance on a special occasion. Traditional forms - mainly the heroic couplet - are used in a new way under a new necessity. A poem on the art of satire is followed by three sermons - for Christmas, Whitsun and the feast of St Thomas More - and the concluding poem is an elegy for T. S. Eliot. Together they complement the more personal poems collected in `Life is a Platform', which is published simultaneously.