"The Morning Star, like the Sunday Worker and the Daily Worker before it, has always devoted generous space to reviewing poetry. John Rety's popular Well Versed column is now the longest-running weekly poetry column in any national newspaper and is said to add an extra 2 per cent to the paper's sales.

Well Versed: Poems from the Morning Star brings together all the poems published in the first two years of Rety's column from January 2006 to April 2008. It is a wonderfully strong and compelling anthology, eclectic and eccentric, passionate and provocative, ranging from Victor Hugo's Penniless Children and Heinrich Heine's Angels to Johannes Kerkhoven's "visual poems" and Dave Puller's performance-piece Bombs R Us.

There are 120 poems here by 86 writers, including a distinguished international line-up of Jean Cassou, Paul Celan, Roque Dalton, Nazm Hikmet, Antonio Machado and Jacques Prévert. Well-known British names include Danny Abse, Alan Brownjohn, Maureen Duffy, Erich Fried, John Heath-Stubbs, Arthur Jacobs, Bernard Kops and Adrian Mitchell."

Andy Croft in The Morning Star.